On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse r2d2.strauss@verizon.net wrote:
I thought the Wikimedia community should know that a large portion of WIkinews' contributor base has forked into its own project (http://theopenglobe.org) after becoming deeply dissatisfied with Wikinews. The new wiki has finished its creation stage and is about ready to publish news articles.
Hello Tempo,
Good luck. What are the differences between the vision for OpenGlobe and the current practice of English Wikinews?
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful? What are the costs and technical or other work involved? MZM, you are confused in this thread - Wikimedia doesn't exist to serve EN:WP, or to serve its most popular *current* project, it exists to support the global dissemination of all sorts of knowledge, and collaboration to create that knowledge.
That doesn't necessarily mean we need to host projects covering all sorts of knowledge -- we could support merging of our existing projects into other great projects online -- and we should review regularly how we can support cousin projects like WikiHow and Wikitravel. But it certainly means we need to find better ways to improve the availability of freely-licensed collaborative news online, and doing something about it.[1]
SJ
[1] News is an interesting case, because -- as is not true for quotations, dictionary entries, or primary sources -- we *do* contribute dramatically to coverage of current events via Wikipedia. We just haven't yet successfully bridged that popular and effective channel of work and interest with Wikinews or other news-focused projects. The only other project in a similar situation is Wikispecies, where any data on species at least conceptually is welcome in a Wikipedia article on the topic.