On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011
<de10011(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity
first. There is no way it
can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty
of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators,
micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not
hard if you know how to tap into it.
Wikinews can compete with large sites. And
not just that! Wikinews is
the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day
(there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per
day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly
organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future
more than any other project.
I don't think that the Serbian situation scales very well. 100 news
articles per day is even a lot for readers to handle. Serbian project
success depends a lot on the language/country correlation. It also does
not take long to get from Belgrade to the furthest part of the country.
A New Zealand wikinews buried in a larger English language project won't
attract a lot of attention outside New Zealand.
Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of
the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a
major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within
minutes of the event. That article and many corrections went on line
immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.
Ray