--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
I disagree. The work being done on Wikinews is, as I
have already
explained before and as is also described in the Wikinews FAQ, very
different from the work done on Wikipedia: in-detail coverage of
individual events rather than summary-style overviews of a series of
events. To give you an example, one of the first French Wikinews
articles is this one about polling stations in Paris for the current
Iraqi elections:
And that is a best case scenario. But one of the most cited reasons why
*Wikipedia* is so great is the fact that it is kept up-to-date. The same type
of person who is interested in current events is in the same pool of people who
would likely contribute to Wikinews. These are news junkies. If *any*
particular Wikipedia doesn't have enough contributors in this area, then
drawing upon that limited pool is going to do some harm.
You cited a Wikipedia regular as the author of this article. That's great but
the time it took to write and research that single story could have been spent
updating perhaps a half dozen existing Wikipedia articles. In this particular
case I think those edits will very likely be accomplished by other people
rather quickly. But if a great many news junkies are drawn away from the
encyclopedia, then this is going to have a negative effect on keeping the
encyclopedia up to date. I'm certain that this is not an issue for English and
German but beyond that I'm not so sure.
Because it is different, Wikinews attracts different
contributors than
Wikipedia.
Your one example was of a Wikipedian creating a Wikinews story.
We're not in a position to tell people what they
should and shouldn't be
doing. We should give people the option to work on Wikinews if they want
to.
And you are not in a position to go against the will of any wiki user
community.
The only thing your proposed requirement would
accomplish is pissing
off volunteers who are ready to put time and energy into a worthwhile
project.
You have already managed to piss a great many people on the French Wikipedia
off. They *do* most certainly have a say - as do all language communities -
whether or not they are ready for another project. It is up to them, NOT YOU.
-- mav
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