I am posting this to foundation-l and wikitech-l, because there is both
a technical and a policy aspect here.
A small but growing group of Wikinews contributors is actively making
audio recordings of Wikinews stories. This effort is coordinated here:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews
The files are uploaded to the Commons in Ogg Vorbis format. Now, two
members of this group have started to also produce a streamed version of
this, which is broadcast at specific times -- effectively Internet
radio. This could grow into a real independent wikiradio project which
perhaps could encompass more than just news. The usefulness of realtime
broadcasting for news should be obvious.
The current Wikinews page is at:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:WikiNews_Network
Now, here is our dilemma:
Streaming audio in realtime requires special software. WNN currently
uses ShoutCast, which is not free/open source software. It is also not
hosted on Wikimedia's servers, but on the server of one of our
contributors. (We have the same issue with the print edition, but I'll
try to resolve this separately.)
Do we want to run this on our own servers? If so, there is a free
software implementation called Icecast. Would it be possible to securely
set up an Icecast server for this purpose on our hardware?
If we don't want to run it on our servers, should we allow it to be
called "Wikinews Network", or should it use a different name?
Should we set any specific limits for the project's scope beyond NPOV,
or should we let it experiment freely with the format for the time
being? (There was some talk about ads on the program, but I made it
clear that this was absolutely impossible.) As for NPOV, a wiki-radio
project might want to broadcast news *about* the wiki community; do
these have to strictly adhere to NPOV (the German Wikipedia:Kurier, for
example, does not)?
Best,
Erik