On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:

Is it possible that sometimes Wikipedia steals Wikinews' thunder?

You get something like that kid (not) in a balloon and it struggles/fails to get on Wikipedia but I assume did OK on Wikinews.

Sometimes a current event is big enough that Wikipedia can cover it without fear of deletion (I think of Katrina) and I seem to recall the coverage in Wikipedia was amazing.

Perhaps that means Wikinews can only ever be a little brother because Wikipedia gets to cover the big stories as well as Wikinews ever will.

The [[Colorado balloon incident]] Wikipedia article has had 120,000 views. I'm sure that the [[6-year-old boy in Colorado found alive, unhurt after runaway balloon allegedly carried him away]] article on Wikinews received far, far less attention.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:02 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:

How do you determine the number of views a particular Wikipedia page has received?

http://stats.grok.se/en/200910/Colorado%20Balloon%20Incident

-Robert Rohde

2009/11/5 Peter Coombe thewub.wiki@googlemail.com:

Wikinews has it's problems, and is often overshadowed by it's bigger brother Wikipedia. But it certainly hasn't failed. There's a respectable amount of content being produced, including original reporting that just would not fit on Wikipedia. Articles are picked up by Google News (at least, they will be again once a bug is fixed). And there is a fairly small but dedicated community.

Mmm.

It's fair to say that Wikinews has not exploded massively, or become a first-rank household-name service like Wikipedia has. It'd be great if it did, of course, but not doing so isn't a sign of failure!

We did astonishingly, staggeringly, unbelievably, improbably well with Wikipedia. Failing to replicate that is to be expected; it's unlikely we could deliberately manage such a success without a shedload of good luck. "It's got a wiki in it" isn't a magic spell, after all.

Wikinews is, as Pete says, flourishing quietly; it has a community, it has readers - though I'd be interested to see figures - and it is making steps in the outside world, reaching people and making a niche independently of its "big sibling" Wikipedia. It's not become a top-ten website, it's not a household name, but then, neither are the other sites working in this field.

The readership of the English Wikinews is 8m pageviews/month; this is only about 50% less than the English Wikiquote or Wikisource, both quite stable and regarded projects. There's certainly a core of people out there who read it, and who are presumably satisfied enough to keep doing so. The authors enjoy writing it; the readers continue to, well, continue to read it. Administratively and technically, it's a small cost; from a volunteer perspective, the loss to the other projects of people who might be working on them is offset by the fact that there's a definite social benefit to keeping multiple projects so that people can change what they're working on for a whle rather than burn out and leave entirely. And, of course, people who actively want to write journalism have somewhere to do it.

2009/11/5 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:

2009/11/5 Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk:

...

We did astonishingly, staggeringly, unbelievably, improbably well with Wikipedia. Failing to replicate that is to be expected; it's unlikely we could deliberately manage such a success without a shedload of good luck. "It's got a wiki in it" isn't a magic spell, after all.

I've always thought the next likely hit would be Commons. It'd need something like the cats-as-tags feature, though. I'd like not to be able to describe it as "Sorta like Getty Images but the search sucks."

(And I know the search has improved a lot of late.)

- d.