Hi all, reading this thread with much interest. Lots of ideas on this, in bullet points:
- As a journalism professor, I've followed (and debated) Wikinews since its very start. I say this not to claim authority, but simply to say it has been something I've pondered continually for six years now. See this interview I did with Harvard Nieman Lab for my thoughts, both text and visual on why I thought Wikinews had problems: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collabora...
- I remember having exchanges with Erik and others during Wikinews's inception -- I didn't think wikis were well suited for producing news (wire and breaking news) and predicted a long term problem. However, I did support Wikinews in spirit and even took up arms as a Wikinewsie. I received press credentials as a Wikinews reporter in 2005 to cover the WTO conference in Hong Kong and saw potential in the spot photography mission of Wikinews. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikinews_creds-_Press_Pass_to_2005_WTO.jpg
- Where Wikinews has been successful and clearly valuable is in what those in journalism call "feature" content. Interviews with political leaders, photography of events, and investigative pieces. These verifiable forms of reporting are not time critical and don't demand "full coverage" like breaking news beats. The Wikinews interview with Shimon Peres is a good example: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel
This got me to thinking about Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature that says, "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."
The corollary to this is: "At some point, news stops being news. A Wikipedia article never stops being an article." This is where the tension lies, and why Wikinews is not a clean mapping over of Wikipedia principles.
Wikis depend on eventualism: given an infinite timeline, pages eventually get better. News cannot survive on that. The "decay" of the value of breaking news and the long timeline for eventualism are at odds with each other.
- Pointing at WMF's lack of support seems misplaced. Wikipedia took off and had its viral growth well before WMF had a board or a budget for more than simply paying for servers and bandwidth. Few, if any, community projects in the Wikimedia universe depend on explicit WMF support for their fundamental survival.
- But all is not lost. Here is where I think Wikinews can rise from the ashes, and be a powerful project. I was inspired by Achal Prabhala's "Oral Citations" project he presented at Wikimania 2011. The basic gist: in Wikipedia, how do you reference knowledge that isn't on the web or even written down yet? This is where our "first world" standards of [citation needed] and strict referencing clash with nascent Wikipedia editions (like in India and Africa) which don't have nearly as many online sources as in English and European languages. Achal's idea: make Oral Citations a project where you can record folk and non-written knowledge and make your own material that can be referenced in Wikipedia articles. His example was documenting a children's game in India that is widely played, widely known, but not written-down and referenceable in a way that would satisfy Wikipedia's standards. See the "People are Knowledge" video here: http://vimeo.com/26469276
Immediately, I saw how Wikinews could step up to this challenge. Oral Citations is fundamentally an act of journalism (even if Achal and his team never use the term). Wikinews could be doing what National Geographic does, by creating multimedia-rich feature stories that document corners of the world not yet covered by market-driven journalism. In essence, if People are Knowledge, create referenceable works and stories from those people.
And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented, mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem to have stalled lately. And I have to imagine how interesting this is to GLAM cooperation that is now so prominent in the community. Putting my educational hat on, I could see this project being something journalism schools around the world could feed into, and be a powerful global project that brings together many different storytellers to help feed a feature journalism mission of Wikinews. It could be something that museums and the cultural sector around the world participate in. It's the next logical evolution of Wikipedia's principles.
WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."
Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.