Greetings everyone,
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.
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors.
-Tempodivalse
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:50:55PM -0500, Tempodivalse wrote:
Greetings everyone,
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.
Wow, that was a long time coming.
I wish we could have worked together with wikinews better, and I wish theopenglobe the best of luck going forward. :-)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
On 12 September 2011 21:50, 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. At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors.
Any comment from the Wikinews contributors who just posted to foundation-l saying everything was fine and people saying it wasn't were clueless?
- d.
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 1:50 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)
Congratulations to the successful launch of the fork and good luck! Hopefully this will lead to some new discoveries that will benefit all efforts in this space.
All best, Erik
Not interested in all the details, but does anyone know how is this different from wikinews?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_fork#Forking_free_and_open_source_soft...
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 14:32, Chris Lee theornamentalist@gmail.com wrote:
Not interested in all the details, but does anyone know how is this different from wikinews? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I didn't mean what is a fork, or how to fork etc...
I meant more along the lines of the difference in scope, guidelines. Why did they break off?
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Jon Davis wiki@konsoletek.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_fork#Forking_free_and_open_source_soft...
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 14:32, Chris Lee theornamentalist@gmail.com wrote:
Not interested in all the details, but does anyone know how is this different from wikinews? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
-- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ http://snowulf.com/ http://ipv6wiki.net/ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 05:59:34PM -0400, Chris Lee wrote:
I didn't mean what is a fork, or how to fork etc...
I meant more along the lines of the difference in scope, guidelines. Why did they break off?
For starters, they weren't happy with the server maintenance by WMF. They couldn't get essential components deployed for 2 years or so.
I'm not sure what the entire set of circumstances was. Someone should probably do a debrief and postmortem.
sincerely, Kim Bruning
I can't speak for the entire Wikinews community, but a lot of it was the lack of technical assistance. There was one major item which Wikinews _really_ need to be even remotely useful and it was very difficult to get any help at all. Eventually the community wrote the extension themselves but couldnt get the dev's to review it appropriately. This was drawn out over several years, and (at least from my view) the Foundation really started to turn around and give much better support starting about 1 year ago.
There is also a host of other backend and support style related issues... but they are ones that the Foundation really wasn't well equipped to handle in the first place. Simply put, the Wikinews concept needs a much more specific set of assistance than the general "Here's a wiki, have fun".
-Jon
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 14:14, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 05:59:34PM -0400, Chris Lee wrote:
I didn't mean what is a fork, or how to fork etc...
I meant more along the lines of the difference in scope, guidelines. Why
did
they break off?
For starters, they weren't happy with the server maintenance by WMF. They couldn't get essential components deployed for 2 years or so.
I'm not sure what the entire set of circumstances was. Someone should probably do a debrief and postmortem.
sincerely, Kim Bruning
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
For starters, they weren't happy with the server maintenance by WMF. They couldn't get essential components deployed for 2 years or so.
for every wikinews pageview there're 1600 english wikipedia pageviews. oh, and 60% of wikinews pageviews come from bots (wikipedias are at around 10% bot traffic methinks)
the only project less popular than wikinews is wikiversity and that says something.
it is much more rewarding to work on projects that impact lots of people ;-)
Domas
Interesting link, but a bit focused on software. No mention to content communities.
Wiki[pm]edia suffered other forks previously, like Enciclopedia Libre.
2011/9/12 Jon Davis wiki@konsoletek.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_fork#Forking_free_and_open_source_soft...
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 14:32, Chris Lee theornamentalist@gmail.com wrote:
Not interested in all the details, but does anyone know how is this different from wikinews? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
-- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ http://snowulf.com/ http://ipv6wiki.net/ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse r2d2.strauss@verizon.netwrote:
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors.
Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
Kirill
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse r2d2.strauss@verizon.netwrote:
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors.
Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
According to the stats, en.wn has less than 50 contributors with >5 edits per month, and less than five contributors with >100 edits per month
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikinews/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikinews/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt100.htm
-- John Vandenberg
I do believe it means exactly that.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page:
- 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1 edit/day) - 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days - 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days ("super active"): Brian McNeil and Pi zero
I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low, especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost useless for people who want to stay informed about current events.
2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss@verizon.net
wrote:
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are
active
remaining Wikinews contributors.
Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
Kirill _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer similar levels of inactivity.
English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous. English Wikibooks has only 10, which is more than can be said for most language editions of Wikibooks, which are all but dead.
There are two problems here, I think. The first one is lack of support from WMF, which everyone likes to talk about a lot. The other one is the assumption that these projects are worthwhile and that WMF or anyone else *should* care about them.
Let's say a GeoCities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities ) site about your grandmother's pet cat somehow ended up being one of our sister projects. Since it's not very useful to most people, it remains a very low-traffic site, and WMF doesn't put a lot of energy into it. Then a lot of people come along and bellyache that WMF is not giving Grandma's GeoCities cat site any support and that it's undervalued, with the assumption that just because it is a sister project, it should be treated exactly equally to Wikipedia, with the unproven assumption that it offers just as much potential and just as much educational value as our "flagship" site. Of course that's nonsense, who cares about your grandmother's cats besides her?
I do think some of the sister projects are extremely valuable (Commons in particular; Wiktionary can be useful in some ways, same with Wikisource; Wikibooks and Wikinews were at least nice ideas that don't seem to have been well-suited to the Wiki process in the end), but I'm tired of the assumption that people *should* support and care about sister projects just because they're sister projects, without proving their usefulness or worthiness of our support.
2011/9/12 M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com
I do believe it means exactly that.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page:
- 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1
edit/day)
- 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days
- 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days ("super active"):
Brian McNeil and Pi zero
I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low, especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost useless for people who want to stay informed about current events.
2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss@verizon.net
wrote:
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several
others
(including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are
active
remaining Wikinews contributors.
Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
Kirill _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:13:51PM -0700, M. Williamson wrote:
It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer similar levels of inactivity.
Well yeah, first let them wither on the vine, then declare them useless when they're almost dead.
Then congratulate everyone when they cut off the fat.
One day I'm going to write a manual, and that move is going to be in there. ;-)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
I am seeing a lot of "lack of support from WMF for these smaller projects" but not being a smaller projects editor I don't know what specific issues there are.
Can someone up on the situation send out more specifics?
Thank you.
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:13 PM, M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer similar levels of inactivity.
English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous. English Wikibooks has only 10, which is more than can be said for most language editions of Wikibooks, which are all but dead.
There are two problems here, I think. The first one is lack of support from WMF, which everyone likes to talk about a lot. The other one is the assumption that these projects are worthwhile and that WMF or anyone else *should* care about them.
Let's say a GeoCities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities ) site about your grandmother's pet cat somehow ended up being one of our sister projects. Since it's not very useful to most people, it remains a very low-traffic site, and WMF doesn't put a lot of energy into it. Then a lot of people come along and bellyache that WMF is not giving Grandma's GeoCities cat site any support and that it's undervalued, with the assumption that just because it is a sister project, it should be treated exactly equally to Wikipedia, with the unproven assumption that it offers just as much potential and just as much educational value as our "flagship" site. Of course that's nonsense, who cares about your grandmother's cats besides her?
I do think some of the sister projects are extremely valuable (Commons in particular; Wiktionary can be useful in some ways, same with Wikisource; Wikibooks and Wikinews were at least nice ideas that don't seem to have been well-suited to the Wiki process in the end), but I'm tired of the assumption that people *should* support and care about sister projects just because they're sister projects, without proving their usefulness or worthiness of our support.
2011/9/12 M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com
I do believe it means exactly that.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page:
- 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1
edit/day)
- 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days
- 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days ("super active"):
Brian McNeil and Pi zero
I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low, especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost useless for people who want to stay informed about current events.
2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss@verizon.net
wrote:
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several
others
(including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are
active
remaining Wikinews contributors.
Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
Kirill _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
M. Williamson, 13/09/2011 00:13:
English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous.
You're honest in reminding your own prejudices against the project, but that's a very bad example for your own thesis. First, Wikiquote (in several languages) serves his purpose quite well and successfully; a dictionary of quotations can be considered a niche product compared to a vocabulary or an encyclopedia and this explains the not so high numbers but this doesn't mean it's less worthwhile of other more ambitious projects that don't work at all. Second, the English edition has a particularly high number of anonymous edits and edits performed by less active editors: the ability to get contributions by readers seems a success to me, not a fault. Third, you should not consider only absolute but also relative numbers. I remember a presentation of Erik Moeller at Wikimania 2010 where he showed views and activity stats of our projects to prove how some of them are failing; he even forgot to mention Wikiquote, but his own numbers showed that it was the project with the highest "return on investment", i.e. the views/activity (work) ratio.
In short, your own argumentation is an example of the problem itself, that is considering non-Wikipedia projects with Wikipedia-only criteria, creating the premises of the failure.
Nemo
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:50:55PM -0500, Tempodivalse wrote:
Greetings everyone,
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.
I'm doing a little digging and asking around now. :-)
Here's a list of wikinews issues, from wikinews perspective (for starters)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Dendodge/Project_focus
sincerely, Kim Bruning
Tempodivalse 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.
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to
go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support.
It's a great injustice to countless contributors that they receive support in name only (as "one of Wikipedia's sister sites" in a handful of publications), but it's indisputably the reality. A classic example of this reality, incidentally, is the GoogleNewsSitemap extension fiasco on the English Wikinews.
I'll echo others in wishing you all the best of luck going forward. I sincerely hope whoever administers your new site will treat you better than Wikimedia has.
MZMcBride
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 05:57:37PM -0400, MZMcBride wrote:
Tempodivalse wrote:
It's a great injustice to countless contributors that they receive support in name only (as "one of Wikipedia's sister sites" in a handful of publications), but it's indisputably the reality. A classic example of this reality, incidentally, is the GoogleNewsSitemap extension fiasco on the English Wikinews.
Yes, WMF essentially failed there. Priorities are not set correctly.
Actually, this same set of failures is evident in all projects (even en.wp). However, most projects are larger, and therefore the cost of forking outweighs the advantages, so far.
I'll echo others in wishing you all the best of luck going forward. I sincerely hope whoever administers your new site will treat you better than Wikimedia has.
Hey, we can all still help out. It's a wiki, after all! :-)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
On 12 September 2011 22:57, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support.
Considering Wikinews was started and pushed heavily by Erik Moller (early on he was personally bailing people up at wikimeets to get them to contribute to it), I suggest your analysis is on crack^W^W^Whypothesises too much cause for what is *entirely* explicable by a small community going insular and going for perceived quality over outreach. This is particularly given that Wikinews explicitly put in the heavyweight review infratructure in order to get in good with Google News. And that review structure is just the sort of thing one would expect to leave contributors dissatisfied and feeling utterly un-wiki about bothering.
I don't know what would be an answer. The new site wants to keep a *lot* less reviewed. But then there's other failure modes for citizen journalism, e.g. Before It's News, which has been pretty much overrun by conspiracy theorists.
- d.
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:08:10PM +0100, David Gerard wrote:
Considering Wikinews was started and pushed heavily by Erik Moller (early on he was personally bailing people up at wikimeets to get them to contribute to it), I suggest your analysis is on crack^W^W^Whypothesises too much cause for what is *entirely* explicable by a small community going insular and going for perceived quality over outreach.
When Erik started working for the WMF, I think he had to go more hands-off due to COI. GNSM sort of was symptomatic of that.
That said, the heavyweight structure was already coming in years ago, I actually managed to cut my teeth on denting it once. (I documented the pattern I used at [[:EN:WP:BRD]] ).
I haven't tracked wikinews as well as I would have liked to, of late. <scratches head>
sincerely, Kim Bruning
David Gerard wrote:
On 12 September 2011 22:57, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support.
Considering Wikinews was started and pushed heavily by Erik Moller (early on he was personally bailing people up at wikimeets to get them to contribute to it), I suggest your analysis is on crack^W^W^Whypothesises too much cause for what is *entirely* explicable by a small community going insular and going for perceived quality over outreach. This is particularly given that Wikinews explicitly put in the heavyweight review infrastructure in order to get in good with Google News. And that review structure is just the sort of thing one would expect to leave contributors dissatisfied and feeling utterly un-wiki about bothering.
I don't know what would be an answer. The new site wants to keep a *lot* less reviewed. But then there's other failure modes for citizen journalism, e.g. Before It's News, which has been pretty much overrun by conspiracy theorists.
I fail to see how it's relevant how Wikinews started or who was the driving force behind it. It's 2011, not 2004. What matters now is the current reality, not the project's origins. The current reality is that nearly any project besides the English Wikipedia has almost no technical support. It's a catch-22, I realize: you don't want to invest finite resources into projects that aren't performing well, but projects won't perform well without resources.
Wikimedia has made its decision and the community has largely sat quiet on the issue. Wikimedia has made it clear in promotional materials, donation drives, and nearly anywhere else that its focus is the English Wikipedia. Of all the criticisms you can make about the Wikimedia Foundation, I wouldn't say that "it's not being upfront about its intentions or motivations on this issue" is a valid one.
Where I see a problem is that it continues to put forward an idea that other projects are receiving some kind of support (they're all "sister projects," see). It's completely disingenuous to those working on these projects to pretend as though they're receiving any kind of support or will in the immediate future. As time passes, frustrations will doubtlessly only grow on other projects. I imagine we'll see repeats of this phenomenon (abandonment --> forking) going forward. Other factors may contribute, of course.
Personally, I think a quick death is preferable to a slow one. Many of these side-projects that have been abandoned ought to be outright shut down, in my opinion. A re-focusing internally and externally would do a world of good, but obviously political realities make some of this impossible. Nobody wants to be the one to say that it's time to give up on Wikiquote or Wikinews or even Wiktionary (if it can't get proper software support), but it may be inevitable regardless.
MZMcBride
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 8:24 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Wikimedia has made its decision and the community has largely sat quiet on the issue. Wikimedia has made it clear in promotional materials, donation drives, and nearly anywhere else that its focus is the English Wikipedia.
Wikinews never had the kind of substantial organic growth that many of the other projects had. According to Eric Zachte's stats, active contributors (five or more edits in a month) peaked in July 2005, nine months after the project was started, and before the Foundation really had any significant clout in determining the direction of the projects. And that peak was at just 110 users. New contributors (making at least 10 career edits) per month has averaged in the single digits for years.
Certainly there are valid points to be made about the level of support over the last few years, but which is the chicken and which is the egg here?
(With the caveat that I'm not now, and never have been, a Wikinews contributor:)
Wikinews offers some outstanding original reporting and interviews, but that's an extraordinarily scarce resource. The rest is pieces synthesising news from elsewhere, and in that regard Wikipedia has needed no assistance in drawing attention and contributions away from Wikinews. What good is yesterday's synthesis today?
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
The current reality is that nearly any project besides the English Wikipedia has almost no technical support.
That's a misunderstanding of what's happening.
I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as well.
But let's take other completed extensions as examples.
1) WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities.
2) ArticleFeedback has been enabled on Hungarian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, and Hindi Wikipedia. (Wikinews, BTW, still runs the predecessor ReaderFeedback extension.)
3) Narayam (an extension to support Indic languages) has been enabled on Malayam Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikipedia, Tamil Wikibooks and Wikisource, and Sanskrit Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and Wiktionary.
MoodBar will be made more widely available as it matures. And so on and so forth.
It's true that English Wikipedia often (not always) serves as a staging ground for new features, but that's an entirely different matter and doesn't negate the intent of achieving maximum cross-project/cross-site impact with the work we do.
It's also not true that Commons development has anything to do with grant money. WMF received a one-time grant for Commons-related development, but all recent development has been funded from WMF's operating budget, and it's part of our standard roadmap -- for the simple reason that investing in Commons serves all our projects and increases our impact world-wide. And that's, of course, why we sought the grant in the first place, not the other way around.
It is true that projects like Wikinews and Wiktionary, to fully succeed (if success is possible), almost certainly require more specialized product development and devotion in addition to the general development work that benefits all projects.
It's my own view that specialized development is best-served by ensuring that we give the global community great spaces to innovate and create new things. We've put quite a bit of development effort recently into improving MediaWiki's support for gadgets, and we're also working on the Wikimedia Labs project to this end ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs ). WMF's role for specialized improvements should ideally be to review and deploy code that's ready to serve a well-identified purpose and that doesn't have harmful side-effects. Where we haven't don't do so in a timely and reasonable fashion, we must strive to do better.
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But let's take other completed extensions as examples.
- WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities.
Ahem, The first of those were Hindi, and that was basically only after a B# fight in the bug report that there shouldn't be any restriction to installing it on the non en.wikipedia project
- ArticleFeedback has been enabled on Hungarian Wikipedia, Portuguese
Wikibooks, and Hindi Wikipedia. (Wikinews, BTW, still runs the predecessor ReaderFeedback extension.)
Hindi again had the reluctance of no one wanting it to enable it in the first place as well...
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:45 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
Ahem, The first of those were Hindi, and that was basically only after a B# fight in the bug report that there shouldn't be any restriction to installing it on the non en.wikipedia project
With any feature there are normal considerations about when it's ready to be pushed out more widely. Having a feature that's under very active development, with known issues, widely deployed beyond its original staging ground can cause significant and avoidable burden. That's what those discussions are about (which were mirrored by internal conversations about readiness). There's no internal WMF faction that argues for "only serving English Wikipedia", and there never has been.
Erik Moeller wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
The current reality is that nearly any project besides the English Wikipedia has almost no technical support.
That's a misunderstanding of what's happening.
I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as well.
Huh. I always thought it was "a rising tide sinks all ships." ;-)
- WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities.
I was pretty clear about other projects (read: Wikipedias) being peripheral. Your argument seems to largely be "but at some point, this development work might help other sites." My point is that without specific focus, these other sites languish and slowly die. A software package that was built for an encyclopedia can't work for a dictionary. It doesn't work for a dictionary. It also can't and doesn't work for a number of other concepts.
- ArticleFeedback has been enabled on Hungarian Wikipedia, Portuguese
Wikibooks, and Hindi Wikipedia. (Wikinews, BTW, still runs the predecessor ReaderFeedback extension.)
The parenthetical demonstrates Wikinews' abandonment, right?
It's also not true that Commons development has anything to do with grant money. WMF received a one-time grant for Commons-related development, but all recent development has been funded from WMF's operating budget, and it's part of our standard roadmap -- for the simple reason that investing in Commons serves all our projects and increases our impact world-wide. And that's, of course, why we sought the grant in the first place, not the other way around.
It seemed to me that the grant funded a hastily put together extension that was in such poor shape by the time the clock struck midnight that it had to be further developed by Wikimedia to be even somewhat salvageable.
It is true that projects like Wikinews and Wiktionary, to fully succeed (if success is possible), almost certainly require more specialized product development and devotion in addition to the general development work that benefits all projects.
Is it fair to contributors of those projects to be put on indefinite hold? Everyone agrees that focused, specialized development and devotion is needed, but I don't believe it's anywhere on the horizon. Is Wikimedia purgatory the best that these projects can hope for?
MZMcBride
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:26 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
My point is that without specific focus, these other sites languish and slowly die. A software package that was built for an encyclopedia can't work for a dictionary. It doesn't work for a dictionary. It also can't and doesn't work for a number of other concepts.
Of course, up to this point we all agree. That said, far from a myopic focus on English Wikipedia, strategies to support specialized needs and exploration of new ideas have long been very much a high priority for WMF. It's an issue that's very clearly articulated in the "Encourage Innovation" section of the strategic plan:
[begin quote] Support the infrastructure of networked innovation and research. - Develop clear documentation and APIs so that developers can create applications that work easily with our platforms. - Ensure access to computing resources and data for interested researchers and developers, including downloadable copies of all public data. - Continually improve social and technical systems for volunteer development of core software, extensions, gadgets and other technical improvements.
Promote the adoption of great ideas. - Develop clear processes for code review, acceptance and deployment so that volunteer development does not linger in limbo. - Organize meetings and events bringing together developers and researchers who are focused on Wikimedia-related projects with experienced Wikimedia volunteers and staff. - Showcase and recognize the greatest innovations of the Wikimedia movement, and create community spaces dedicated to the exploration of new ideas. [end quote]
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary...
That strategy is very much reflected in our actions and our budgeting, as is evident from consulting recent activity reports.
One can legitimately criticize that this helps achieve incremental improvements across the board, but leaves a gap of "large, focused investment to meet specialized needs" (e.g. build new software to support a wiki-based dictionary). But it doesn't necessarily have to do so.
IMO, the question that's worth asking is: What's the constraint that's keeping more people from launching successful initiatives under the Wikimedia umbrella? There are clearly both technical and social constraints. One technical constraint is the fact that taking an initiative from scratch to a successful launch requires considerable WMF support along the way. How can we reduce the need for WMF organizational support?
The Wikimedia Labs project ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs ) is designed to push that boundary. In the "Test Dev Labs" environment, the goal is to make it possible to test and develop software under conditions that are very close to the WMF production environment. This means that, provided you're willing to invest sufficient resources, you should be able to get a project much closer to "WMF readiness" than you are today with far less WMF help. Indeed, it is designed to not become an on-ramp for new volunteers not just in development, but also site operations.
That's of course a risky project and it may not live up to our expectations. But it's IMO a smarter bet to make than just picking (with an unavoidable element of arbitrariness) one of the many specialized areas in which we currently aren't succeeding and throwing $ and developers at it. Because it could enable us to approach far more organizations and individuals to invest time and money in complex free knowledge problems without having to pass through the WMF bottleneck.
There are literally thousands of mission-driven organizations that would love to find ways to help solve problems in the free knowledge spaces we're occupying. Yet, even Wikimedia's own chapter organizations are still only a relatively small part of the ecosystem of technical innovation (which is no discredit to the many things they have done, including some great technical work).
Having organizations take on challenges either because they are inherently suited to do so, or simply because they have the organizational bandwidth, seems like a fairly rational path to increase our ability to get things done. If that's the world we want to live in, it also seems entirely rational to me that WMF should focus on general high impact improvements while continually investing a considerable amount of its capacity in helping more people to build great things.
In addition to technical support systems, forks can be a very good and healthy part of that development (to break out of social constraints), as can be the development of new organizations. A Wikinews Foundation, or a Wiki Journalism Foundation, or some other such construct may make a lot of sense in the long run, specifically when it comes to the problem of citizen journalism.
Erik Moeller, 13/09/2011 03:55:
That's of course a risky project and it may not live up to our expectations. But it's IMO a smarter bet to make than just picking (with an unavoidable element of arbitrariness) one of the many specialized areas in which we currently aren't succeeding and throwing $ and developers at it.
But that's exactly what the WMF is doing. The Usability Initiative, the WikiLove extension, ArticleFeedback, MoodBar, StructuredProfile and so on (you didn't mention LiquidThreads, but that's another one if it's not freezed) all are risky projects with which the WMF is intervening on areas and problems of the software which have always been overlooked: all of them have [had] their (big) issues but the WMF has decided to take the risk.[1] So your point is just the usual one: Wikipedia is currently a success, it's probably the only thing we're able to do, so let's put all resources and risks there,[2] we can fail but considering the past we are also likely to succeed. The idea that others should take the risk of working on non-Wikipedia projects is the logical consequence and ecnouraging innovation is a good thing, but it doesn't change the fact that the premise is highly dubious.
Nemo
[1] And I agree, although I disagree on some details and I'm not convinced at all that all of them can actually be useful for other languages. [2] And mostly on the English edition for the same reasoning.
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as well.
I believe the correct name for that is the trickle-down effect :)
- WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities.
Uh oh - criticism time...
WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in depth). It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community (because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been controversial).
WMF failed it's role in several critical ways there.
And it a wider one too; because it seems to me there are more critical technical issues in smaller projects that are not being fixed or addressed or supported. And instead things like WikiLove appear.... feels like a bad application of resources.
Just my view; but I think that the idea that sister projects do not get the developer support they need is a fair assessment.
Tom
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas@googlemail.com
wrote:
- WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities.
Uh oh - criticism time...
WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in depth).
Wikilove was produced by Ryan Kaldari, and active Wikimedian and participant on this list as well as a staffer, pretty much on his own time (from what I understood as he explained it to me). I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off point, there. I don't think he was out of touch with the issues in depth...
It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community (because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been controversial).
It was deployed with minimal discussion, but I still wouldn't assign the blame to devs not understanding the community. You're making some pretty big assumptions.
MZMcBride, 13/09/2011 00:24:
Wikimedia has made its decision and the community has largely sat quiet on the issue.
Rectius: the Wikimedia Foundation (as you say below). Other Wikimedia people, groups and organizations don't think so and are even accused not to have the "legitimacy" (!) to invest resources (especially money) on projects other than Wikipedia. That's the message: working on non-Wikipedia projects is not only risky and probably useless (in terms of revenue) and anyway something we don't want to do ourself, but even immoral. I don't know, it might be right: nobody has the monopoly of the truth; but for this very reason, when I see such dogmas stated or implicitly assumed, I'm very worried that we might have overlooked something and be going to do something very wrong.
Wikimedia has made it clear in promotional materials, donation drives, and nearly anywhere else that its focus is the English Wikipedia. Of all the criticisms you can make about the Wikimedia Foundation, I wouldn't say that "it's not being upfront about its intentions or motivations on this issue" is a valid one.
Nemo
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support.
oh that is alarming. can you tell me more? mike
Hoi, With the strategic plan it is clear and obvious that the WMF intends to expand. It is clear that India and Brazil get serious attention. With the creation of the "localisation team" there is now substantial attention for language issues and language technology. This will make the technological gap between languages using the Latin script and languages that use other scrips like Hindi substantially less. Thanks, GerardM
On 18 September 2011 17:51, Mike Dupont jamesmikedupont@googlemail.comwrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred
to
go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types
are
abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support.
oh that is alarming. can you tell me more? mike _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Mike Dupont jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned.
oh that is alarming. can you tell me more?
That is alarming because it is MZM's fear, but it does not represent the views of the Foundation.
(MZM, would you mind finding a more accurate way to express your observations, hopes and frustrations on this subject?)
Not speaking on behalf of the Foundation, but repeating what Erik said earlier and pointing to our five-year plan, the WMF is prioritizing community-driven innovation as one of its core targets for support. There is a language barrier to overcome; as Gerard notes the localisation team should help improve matters there.
And in my experience the WMF spends a great deal of time in public and internally working with, researching, and discussing the smaller projects and languages. Far more than "proportional to current size or readership" -- maybe not as much as some would like. For anyone who wishes to see more work on their favorite project : please suggest a specific way to make that happen. :-)
MZMcBride writes:
Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support.
All sister projects are able to pull in grant money if it is pursued. There are a variety of major foundations devoted to, or prioritizing, curation and access to {primary source materials, language and literacy materials, civic journalism, free textbooks, open educational resources, biology and species data, oral histories, &c.}. I would love to see us attract more of that sort of interest. Even projects that we worry about and say "did not achieve critical mass" are often significant successes by the standards of existing grant-supported work elsewhere in the world.
Sam.
Samuel Klein wrote:
Not speaking on behalf of the Foundation, but repeating what Erik said earlier and pointing to our five-year plan, the WMF is prioritizing community-driven innovation as one of its core targets for support.
Wikimedia has made the English Wikipedia its primary focus. The question becomes whether that's fair to the other projects and whether it makes sense for Wikimedia to continue "maintaining" them. Would it make more sense for Wikimedia to limit its focus and maintain a few projects much better? It's a question of what's fairest to the communities and a question of how long either side is willing to wait.
MZMcBride
On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:25 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Mike Dupont jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned.
oh that is alarming. can you tell me more?
That is alarming because it is MZM's fear, but it does not represent the views of the Foundation.
(MZM, would you mind finding a more accurate way to express your observations, hopes and frustrations on this subject?) ... All sister projects are able to pull in grant money if it is pursued. There are a variety of major foundations devoted to, or prioritizing, curation and access to {primary source materials, language and literacy materials, civic journalism, free textbooks, open educational resources, biology and species data, oral histories, &c.}. I would love to see us attract more of that sort of interest. Even projects that we worry about and say "did not achieve critical mass" are often significant successes by the standards of existing grant-supported work elsewhere in the world.
Sam,
While it is nice to say that the other projects can request grants from other organisations, MZM's point is that the WMF is focusing on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
The strategic plan mentions Wikipedia an awful lot, and the WMF does appear to be focusing on English Wikipedia and Commons. Of course WMF's investment in the mediawiki platform and innovation helps the sister projects, but the sister projects continue to struggle because they haven't had the same amount of support as Wikipedia over the years. The sun does not shine directly on them. Have I told you about the time that the WMF told a journo that it was OK to use "Wikipedia" instead of "Wikisource" in an magazine article about a Wikisource project?
I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project. It would be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind. maybe the WMF can have _one_ "sister projects support officer" (think how many dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
-- John Vandenberg
2011/9/22 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com
On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:25 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Mike Dupont jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several
hundred to go."
Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English
Wikipedia.
All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are
abandoned.
oh that is alarming. can you tell me more?
That is alarming because it is MZM's fear, but it does not represent the views of the Foundation.
(MZM, would you mind finding a more accurate way to express your observations, hopes and frustrations on this subject?) ... All sister projects are able to pull in grant money if it is pursued. There are a variety of major foundations devoted to, or prioritizing, curation and access to {primary source materials, language and literacy materials, civic journalism, free textbooks, open educational resources, biology and species data, oral histories, &c.}. I would love to see us attract more of that sort of interest. Even projects that we worry about and say "did not achieve critical mass" are often significant successes by the standards of existing grant-supported work elsewhere in the world.
Sam,
While it is nice to say that the other projects can request grants from other organisations, MZM's point is that the WMF is focusing on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
The strategic plan mentions Wikipedia an awful lot, and the WMF does appear to be focusing on English Wikipedia and Commons. Of course WMF's investment in the mediawiki platform and innovation helps the sister projects, but the sister projects continue to struggle because they haven't had the same amount of support as Wikipedia over the years. The sun does not shine directly on them. Have I told you about the time that the WMF told a journo that it was OK to use "Wikipedia" instead of "Wikisource" in an magazine article about a Wikisource project?
I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project. It would be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind. maybe the WMF can have _one_ "sister projects support officer" (think how many dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
Indeed. I remember saying that loudly in Gdansk, when Sue presented us the Strategic Plan and Wikipedia was all over the pages, but none of the sister projects. Many of our sister projects has developed a proper identity and direction (sure Wikisource has) but a major support wiuld be very much appreciated. Some of the requests in bugzilla (even simple ones) lay down there for years, and communities are just left alone with their technical issues. I think sister project communities would be enthusiastic if the Foundation had staff dedicated to them and their problems. Even a fellow as proposed by Amir (a guy who examine communities and their tools, collecting knowledge and requests for tools, gadgets and extensions) would be awesome.
Aubrey
-- John Vandenberg
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On 22/09/11 10:12, Andrea Zanni wrote:
when Sue presented us the Strategic Plan and Wikipedia was all over the pages, but none of the sister projects.
I have to say, whenever I make a presentation of Wikimedia and mention sister projects, all I get is blank stares. It really makes sense to focus on Wikipedia in outreach activities.
2011/9/22 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.rs
On 22/09/11 10:12, Andrea Zanni wrote:
when Sue presented us the Strategic Plan and Wikipedia was all over the pages, but none of the sister projects.
I have to say, whenever I make a presentation of Wikimedia and mention sister projects, all I get is blank stares. It really makes sense to focus on Wikipedia in outreach activities.
Well, I understand that, but there is a lot of space for development, and for example a project like Wikisource can be extremely interesting for GLAMs (i.e. look at the BnF project with French Wikisource).
Aubrey
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On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:04 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project. It would be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind. maybe the WMF can have _one_ "sister projects support officer" (think how many dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
There is an entire department -- Global Development -- whose current job is to support the growth of the many Indic language projects, Portuguese Wikipedia, and Arabic Wikipedia (they call that Middle East, North Africa)?
Or how about the hundreds of hours spent in Tech on the new Commons UploadWizard?
Those are just two examples, but more importantly: there are actually *no people at all* at the Foundation whose job description is "dedicated" English Wikipedia support. There are some people (like myself) who do not speak other languages, but that is a problem rather than an advantage in my work.
Steven
Steven Walling wrote:
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:04 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project. It would be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind. maybe the WMF can have _one_ "sister projects support officer" (think how many dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
There is an entire department -- Global Development -- whose current job is to support the growth of the many Indic language projects, Portuguese Wikipedia, and Arabic Wikipedia (they call that Middle East, North Africa)?
Or how about the hundreds of hours spent in Tech on the new Commons UploadWizard?
Steven, you seem to have completely missed the mark.
John was responding to my comment(s) about the focus of Wikimedia being Wikipedia (mostly the English-language version) and occasionally Wikimedia Commons. John said "I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project." By this, he meant a project like Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikiversity or any of the other sister projects of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikipedia%27s_sister_projects.
The examples you gave were a few other Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons. Is there an entire department working on Wikisource? What about Wikiversity? Wikinews? Is there a single staffer who's even thinking about any of them as part of their work? I don't know of any. And, back to the original thought: are there any Wikimedia initiatives to specifically (or "primarily") improve any of these sister projects? I also don't know of any.
MZMcBride
On Sep 22, 2011 8:48 PM, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Steven Walling wrote:
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:04 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com
wrote:
I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project. It would be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind. maybe the WMF can have _one_ "sister projects support officer" (think how many dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
There is an entire department -- Global Development -- whose current job
is
to support the growth of the many Indic language projects, Portuguese Wikipedia, and Arabic Wikipedia (they call that Middle East, North
Africa)?
Or how about the hundreds of hours spent in Tech on the new Commons UploadWizard?
Steven, you seem to have completely missed the mark.
John was responding to my comment(s) about the focus of Wikimedia being Wikipedia (mostly the English-language version) and occasionally Wikimedia Commons. John said "I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project." By this, he meant a project like Wikinews, Wikisource,
Wikiversity
or any of the other sister projects of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikipedia%27s_sister_projects.
The examples you gave were a few other Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons.
Is
there an entire department working on Wikisource? What about Wikiversity? Wikinews? Is there a single staffer who's even thinking about any of them
as
part of their work? I don't know of any. And, back to the original
thought:
are there any Wikimedia initiatives to specifically (or "primarily")
improve
any of these sister projects? I also don't know of any.
MZMcBride
Bah. My mistake. Sorry if that sounded confused, I was just reacting to the idea that there are any staff dedicated solely to English Wikipedia, which isn't true.
Steven _______________________________________________
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On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
.. Bah. My mistake. Sorry if that sounded confused, I was just reacting to the idea that there are any staff dedicated solely to English Wikipedia, which isn't true.
replace 'solely' with 'predominately' and, afaics, it becomes true. The WMF staff to directly assist English Wikipedia and Commons. They rarely do the same for other projects.
What percentage of your 9-5 job, on avg, is non - English Wikipedia+Commons?
Please look at the percentage of your edits which are on English Wikipedia and Commons.
http://toolserver.org/~quentinv57/sulinfo/Steven_%28WMF%29
8 of 2,636 edits (0.3%) are on a content project other than ENWP, and four of them are edits to your userpage.
33% of your edits are on English Wikipedia, and those edits are direct community engagement and support. I dont see you directly engaging in any other content project.
http://toolserver.org/~quentinv57/sulinfo/Mdennis%20%28WMF%29
not much better, especially if we consider Maggie's image filter work to be an ENWP related task.
http://toolserver.org/~quentinv57/sulinfo/Philippe_%28WMF%29
a lot worse, given the strategy work result was: "Spend US$180 million over five years mostly on initiatives to increase Wikipedia statistics"
http://toolserver.org/~quentinv57/sulinfo/Jalexander
afaics, most of the non-English Wikipedia edits are to support the fundraiser, which is great work, but that is the "Wikipedia Fundraiser" to fund the strategy created to increase Wikipedia statistics.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia_fundraiser_surp... http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Seventh_Annual_Campaign_to_Support_Wikip... http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Half_a_Million_People_Donate_to_Keep_Wik...
Someone who does have non-English language skills and non-English project experience, and they arnt in use:
http://toolserver.org/~quentinv57/sulinfo/Melamrawy_%28WMF%29
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 8:47 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Is there a single staffer who's even thinking about any of them as part of their work? I don't know of any. And, back to the original thought: are there any Wikimedia initiatives to specifically (or "primarily") improve any of these sister projects? I also don't know of any.
MZMcBride
Yes, there are three staff members in my team alone (me, Christine, Maggie)
who are thinking about them as a part of their work. I responded to a question on Wikiversity last night. I read the major discussion pages on each of the English language projects (regrettably the only language I speak) weekly. I try to hit the others with Google translate regularly, but not quite that.
pb
___________________ Philippe Beaudette Head of Reader Relations Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
415-839-6885, x 6643
philippe@wikimedia.org
Philippe Beaudette wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 8:47 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Is there a single staffer who's even thinking about any of them as part of their work? I don't know of any. And, back to the original thought: are there any Wikimedia initiatives to specifically (or "primarily") improve any of these sister projects? I also don't know of any.
Yes, there are three staff members in my team alone (me, Christine, Maggie) who are thinking about them as a part of their work. I responded to a question on Wikiversity last night. I read the major discussion pages on each of the English language projects (regrettably the only language I speak) weekly. I try to hit the others with Google translate regularly, but not quite that.
My goodness. Boy was I wrong.
To be clear, I don't think it's really anything to be ashamed of. The English Wikipedia is by far the most successful project and it makes sense to invest heavily in what works. My issue is that I don't see Wikimedia being very upfront about their actual objectives. The actual objectives are to encourage Wikipedia's growth and to capitalize on its success as much as possible. If other projects can be helped along the way, great. Which then leads to the question of whether it's fair to the contributors on these projects (and to everyone else, I suppose) to continue supporting these sister projects in name only.
(Tangentially: John is a Wikisorcerer. People are really going to try to argue with him about whether sister projects are being ignored? Don't be silly.)
MZMcBride
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:50:55PM -0500, Tempodivalse wrote:
Greetings everyone,
Heya Tempodivalse,
I understand that a lot of this fork is due to personality conflicts, rather than with WMF itself? That's be a bit of a <phew> to know WMF weren't the folks causing the trouble.
How can we help both openglobe and wikinews flourish, according to you and the current team?
sincerely, Kim Bruning.oO(Keeping open the EGCS gambit as an option)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egcs#EGCS_fork
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:58:33PM +0200, Kim Bruning wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:50:55PM -0500, Tempodivalse wrote:
Greetings everyone,
Heya Tempodivalse,
I understand that a lot of this fork is due to personality conflicts, rather than with WMF itself? That's be a bit of a <phew> to know WMF weren't the folks causing the trouble.
<Tempodivalse> OK, well, the primary reasons for us forking were that we did not like the attitudes that en.wikinews regulars had. <Tempodivalse> and that we felt instruction creep had taken over the project, bringing excess bureaucracy <kim_bruning> was there no way to break off without forking? <Tempodivalse> No. I don't want to bash anyone in particular, but the remaining admins/crats are generally very wary to any proposed changes <Tempodivalse> and tend to regard non-Wikinewsies as people whose opinions are to be discounted as uninformed <Tempodivalse> A few days ago I pointed out the project had reached record-low activity levels and held them for six months - and was shouted down <Tempodivalse> nobody seemed to realise there was a problem, much less address it.
(posted with permission)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
Kim, before you mentioned this was just a personality problem, but it seems to go beyond that. It seems to be a structural problem augmented by personality problems (I can think of a couple people in particular, not naming names). The structural problems are clear to everybody but certain prolific en. Wikinews contributors refuse to recognize that change needs to be made or the project will just stagnate indefinitely, as it has been for a long time now.
2011/9/12 Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:58:33PM +0200, Kim Bruning wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:50:55PM -0500, Tempodivalse wrote:
Greetings everyone,
Heya Tempodivalse,
I understand that a lot of this fork is due to personality conflicts, rather than with WMF itself? That's be a bit of a <phew> to know WMF weren't the folks causing the trouble.
<Tempodivalse> OK, well, the primary reasons for us forking were that we did not like the attitudes that en.wikinews regulars had. <Tempodivalse> and that we felt instruction creep had taken over the project, bringing excess bureaucracy <kim_bruning> was there no way to break off without forking? <Tempodivalse> No. I don't want to bash anyone in particular, but the remaining admins/crats are generally very wary to any proposed changes <Tempodivalse> and tend to regard non-Wikinewsies as people whose opinions are to be discounted as uninformed <Tempodivalse> A few days ago I pointed out the project had reached record-low activity levels and held them for six months - and was shouted down <Tempodivalse> nobody seemed to realise there was a problem, much less address it.
(posted with permission)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
--
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Sounds interesting. It is certainly true that wikinews was never as successful as we had hoped. Perhaps this new project will manage more. Good luck! On Sep 12, 2011 9:51 PM, "Tempodivalse" r2d2.strauss@verizon.net wrote:
Greetings everyone,
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.
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others
(including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors.
-Tempodivalse
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
It's a tiny bit disappointing that the tone here is "oh well, we tried and failed".
When really it should be "cool - now we have a competitor, what do we need to give WN to help them stay in the market"
Tom
On Sep 12, 2011 11:10 PM, "Thomas Morton" morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:
It's a tiny bit disappointing that the tone here is "oh well, we tried and failed".
When really it should be "cool - now we have a competitor, what do we need to give WN to help them stay in the market"
In what way are we competing? Our vision is a world where people have free access to all knowledge. It doesn't say we need to be the ones to provide that knowledge.
We've failed. Maybe someone else will do better. If they do, our goal will still be achieved.
On 12 September 2011 23:17, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 12, 2011 11:10 PM, "Thomas Morton" morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:
It's a tiny bit disappointing that the tone here is "oh well, we tried and failed". When really it should be "cool - now we have a competitor, what do we need to give WN to help them stay in the market"
In what way are we competing? Our vision is a world where people have free access to all knowledge. It doesn't say we need to be the ones to provide that knowledge. We've failed. Maybe someone else will do better. If they do, our goal will still be achieved.
Wikinews is still recoverable. But what it's been doing so far clearly failed. What can they do that would work? Open it up further?
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Wikinews is still recoverable. But what it's been doing so far clearly failed. What can they do that would work? Open it up further?
Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost a source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on on various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem redeemable to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope. Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the concept justice.
If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper project over time. Instead, it primarily regurgitates news stories from elsewhere and outputs them under a free license, which there doesn't seem to be much of a market for. Some of the Wikinews interviews have been impressive, but beyond those, there isn't much to speak of after seven years online.
MZMcBride
I speak from the perspective of an administrator in the Spanish edition. The fact that today Wikinews is not sufficiently relevantly, does not mean that in the future will be equal. The project has unique values and possibilities in the future may be successful.
It is true that even within the same community of Wikipedia editors we are treated as peripheral, but the success of projects depends not only on the internal work that is in them, but promotion we ourselves do it. And it does not depend on whether Wikimedia treat us well or not.
I hope that this fork is the result of the search for a project with clear objectives and specific goals, not the fight between a group of editors and other. If this is the case, however much success.
2011/9/12 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com
David Gerard wrote:
Wikinews is still recoverable. But what it's been doing so far clearly failed. What can they do that would work? Open it up further?
Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost a source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on on various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem redeemable to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope. Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the concept justice.
If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper project over time. Instead, it primarily regurgitates news stories from elsewhere and outputs them under a free license, which there doesn't seem to be much of a market for. Some of the Wikinews interviews have been impressive, but beyond those, there isn't much to speak of after seven years online.
MZMcBride
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:35 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost a source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on on various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem redeemable to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope. Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the concept justice.
If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper project over time.
That's basically the idea... until Wikinews is strong enough in one particular area that it becomes worthwhile to readers (because they get stories they are likely to care about that don't show up on the rest of the news sites out there), it can't reach critical mass. (Sue explains the problem concisely in her post.) The area Wikimedians have the largest pool of common expertise in and access to is the internet and online culture. Covering emerging memes and the 4chan and Anonymous shenanigans and cool and terrible things happening all over the internet... that's an area where there's still not a great go-to source for, at least that has anything like an NPOV approach. Wikinews could have been (and maybe could be still) "local news for people from the internet". But I think the project has been too limited by trying to be like a traditional news organization to take that kind of reporting seriously or encourage it.
The other route to critical mass would be syndication. Even if volume started out small, if high-quality pieces occasionally got syndicated by mainstream news, that could gradually attract more attention and contribution to Wikinews. That's what the CC-BY license is supposed to encourage, but it seems that's not enough. A person (or several people) devoted to outreach / business development who spent a lot of time reaching out to traditional news orgs to let them know about specific high-quality pieces that they could syndicate (for free!) might set the stage for Wikinews (or the new fork) to really succeed. Maybe that could make a good Wikimedia Fellowship project for an ambitious Wikinewsie.
(Sorry, I'm a bit late to this thread.)
-Sage
On Wednesday, September 21, 2011, Sage Ross wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:35 PM, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com javascript:;> wrote:
Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost
a
source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on
on
various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem
redeemable
to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope. Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the concept justice.
If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper project over time.
That's basically the idea... until Wikinews is strong enough in one particular area that it becomes worthwhile to readers (because they get stories they are likely to care about that don't show up on the rest of the news sites out there), it can't reach critical mass.
I'm not sure this analysis is correct. A lot of people now don't get news by going directly to the site but on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Of course, for that to work, we need to publish stories quickly.
When stories hit those sites, they have the potential to start rolling very quickly as people retweet them.
For instance, last night when the Troy Davis execution was going on, the @en_wikinews feed had damn near live updates from the televised stream from Democracy Now and other sources. I had a wiki story written up specifically to try and get it published at the time of execution. It's now still languishing in the review pile.
Another thing Wikinews could be doing better is original, data-based journalism. Governments around the world are now publishing more and more data and releasing it under CC licenses. The British government publish data under the Open Government License which is basically CC BY. US data is public domain. Hungary recently announced they would publish government data as CC BY. Local governments in Britain and Ireland have started publishing open data. This is somewhere where we could create some valuable stories and reuse of the data: software hacker types to pore through the data and make it usable and presentable and Wikimedians to write up stories around it.
Producing original news stories might be slightly more interesting than 'Yet Another Google Maps Mashup' hacks which is usually what is done with the data. It would also produce stories that would be unavailable elsewhere, and, you never know, we might even break a big story and bring down a government or something. ;-)
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
I'm not sure this analysis is correct. A lot of people now don't get news by going directly to the site but on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Of course, for that to work, we need to publish stories quickly.
When stories hit those sites, they have the potential to start rolling very quickly as people retweet them.
I don't see that as much of a way forward for Wikinews, without a niche that will really draw people. What makes @en_wikinews worth following as a news source, as opposed to the many other feeds that do similar things? To be an attractive Twitter / Facebook general news source, the feed would need to publish at a much higher volume than it does, with more consistency in terms of what should be pushed out and what shouldn't.
For instance, last night when the Troy Davis execution was going on, the @en_wikinews feed had damn near live updates from the televised stream from Democracy Now and other sources. I had a wiki story written up specifically to try and get it published at the time of execution. It's now still languishing in the review pile.
As a volunteer project, I think Wikinews has an inherent tension between being timely and having a solid review process. Volunteers work at their own pace. Professionals have both writers and editors working on deadline, and are always going to be able to be more immediate. Live updates and even a quick publication of a full write-up of a big news story that everyone is reading and writing and talking about already... I don't see that as an area where a wiki journalism project has a lot of value to add to the news ecosystem.
Another thing Wikinews could be doing better is original, data-based journalism.
Definitely. This is an area that plays to the strengths of our community: the sources are online and deep, and under-utilized by traditional media, and there's a lot of potential for collaboration on sifting through data in teams looking for interesting nuggets.
I don't think there's much potential for reaching critical mass with Wikinews except through original reporting on areas that provide common ground to a large set of Wikimedians -- both in terms of interest, and in terms of access to sources.
-Sage
Sounds interesting. It is certainly true that wikinews was never as successful as we had hoped. Perhaps this new project will manage more. Good luck!
It's better IMHO without "What do you think of this page?" and page for comments.
Powered by Semantic MediaWiki, hmm.
cc-by-30 - yeah! Next free media :))
Przykuta
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Tempodivalse r2d2.strauss@verizon.net wrote:
Greetings everyone,
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.
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors.
-Tempodivalse
Hi Tempodivalse,
Thanks for the notice! I also wish OpenGlobe luck.
I went looking for discussion about this on Wikinews, and couldn't find anything recent about this on the wikinews mailing list, the English-language Wikinews (I didn't check the other languages) or on Meta. I'm sure I just missed something. Can you point us to any discussion links?
Thanks! Phoebe
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.
Samuel Klein wrote:
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.
You're on the Board still, right? So you probably have more readily available access to these stats than I do: out of Wikimedia's share of resources over the past five years, what percentage has gone to Wikipedia and what percentage has gone to Wikinews? What about Wikiversity? Wikiquote? Wikispecies? Wiktionary?
Wikimedia indisputably now exists to serve the English Wikipedia. Wikimedia is quick to call Sue "Wikipedia Executive Director," isn't it? Or plaster "Wikipedia founder" on every fundraiser-related publication? Out of the last X extensions enabled on Wikimedia wikis, how many were written primarily for the English Wikipedia (MoodBar, WikiLove, ArticleFeedback, etc.)? If you can't provide percentages to the question above, do you know of any resources that have gone to a site other than Wikimedia Commons or a Wikipedia in the past five years? What resources have been devoted to Wikinews in particular?
Thanks for volunteering to clarify some of my confusion. :-)
MZMcBride
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 7:04 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Wikimedia indisputably now exists to serve the English Wikipedia. Wikimedia is quick to call Sue "Wikipedia Executive Director," isn't it? Or plaster "Wikipedia founder" on every fundraiser-related publication? Thanks for volunteering to clarify some of my confusion. :-)
MZMcBride
"Wikipedia founder" is, well, true and meaningful.
In any case... While I'm sure that Wikinews has lacked for attention from the WMF, it seems a reach to blame its current state on that factor alone. It has an ecosystem problem, structural problems that are inherent in its wiki nature, and as Kim mentioned... a potentially serious and long-term personality problem. As I understand it, English Wikinews has for its entire history (or nearly so) been virtually dominated by a single individual with a reputation for volatility. This has often been cited as a drawback of contributing there. Given the small community, it's not hard to imagine how severe personality conflicts could lead to dramatic consequences over time. The problem with Wikinews is the sum of all these factors, not the direct and clear result of any lack of investment from the WMF.
Nathan
On 13 September 2011 00:04, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Wikimedia indisputably now exists to serve the English Wikipedia. Wikimedia is quick to call Sue "Wikipedia Executive Director," isn't it? Or plaster "Wikipedia founder" on every fundraiser-related publication? Out of the last X extensions enabled on Wikimedia wikis, how many were written primarily for the English Wikipedia (MoodBar, WikiLove, ArticleFeedback, etc.)? If you can't provide percentages to the question above, do you know of any resources that have gone to a site other than Wikimedia Commons or a Wikipedia in the past five years? What resources have been devoted to Wikinews in particular?
The "Wikipedia Executive Director" thing was a short-lived, misguided (but well-intentioned) attempt to avoid confusing donors by refering to brands they weren't familiar with. "Wikipedia founder" is just correct. Jimmy did (co-)found Wikipedia. "Wikimedia founder" would be controversial - Jimmy didn't found the other projects. He did found (or, at least, was involved in founding) the WMF, but that's not the same thing as founding Wikimedia.
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.
Hello Andrew,
These are very fine ideas indeed. I have always found the 'breaking news' stories on Wikinews to be among its least interesting content, for all of the reasons you note.
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, reading this thread with much interest. Lots of ideas on this...
Immediately, I saw how Wikinews could step up to this challenge. Oral Citations is fundamentally an act of journalism ... in essence, if People are Knowledge, create referenceable works and stories from those people.
<snip more interesting observations>
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.
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.
My hat is off to you. I went and put one on just to reread this email.
This is an inspiring and powerful idea for what Wikinews can be, and I hope we realize it -- and continue to capture oral history, for citation and otherwise.
Sam.
On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful? What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed original research and never really had very much of it. It is also operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the field pretty much to itself when it started.
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.
The reality is however that it's always en.pedia that is on the receiving end of whatever the foundation wants to do at any given time.
On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful? What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed original research and never really had very much of it. It is also operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the field pretty much to itself when it started.
On the English Wikinews [1] at least, it's seemed to me that part of the issue is that different editors are working on different genres of news. Some do celebrity coverage, others do investigative work or collaborative coverage of breaking events, etc. Those are quite different value propositions that appeal to different types of readers, and I would think that Wikinews has simply never produced enough critical mass of any one genre, sufficient to create and maintain a large readership that wants that genre.
Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like. I think that's true, and I think Wikinews has suffered in comparison, because there are many different types of news, not just one.
Thanks, Sue
[1] the only one I personally can read
Sue Gardner wrote:
On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful? What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed original research and never really had very much of it. It is also operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the field pretty much to itself when it started.
Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like.
Practical experience on a day-to-day basis would suggest that this is unduly optimistic. We are failing to attract new editors who can be, or wish to be, educated into "what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like", and are discarding those experienced editors who do. Even those who remain but are becoming increasingly disillusioned with all the nonsense that goes on will eventually leave, or create a fork of Wikipedia, and to be honest, if I had the money right now, I'd do it myself, and cast ArbCom in its present form into the bottomless pit.
I used to care about Wikipedia, as did others, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Phil Nash phnash@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful? What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed original research and never really had very much of it. It is also operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the field pretty much to itself when it started.
Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like.
Practical experience on a day-to-day basis would suggest that this is unduly optimistic. We are failing to attract new editors who can be, or wish to be, educated into "what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like", and are discarding those experienced editors who do. Even those who remain but are becoming increasingly disillusioned with all the nonsense that goes on will eventually leave, or create a fork of Wikipedia, and to be honest, if I had the money right now, I'd do it myself, and cast ArbCom in its present form into the bottomless pit.
I used to care about Wikipedia, as did others, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
If money is the problem, I can solve that. I recently came into an inheritance.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Phil Nash phnash@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful? What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed original research and never really had very much of it. It is also operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the field pretty much to itself when it started.
Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like.
Practical experience on a day-to-day basis would suggest that this is unduly optimistic. We are failing to attract new editors who can be, or wish to be, educated into "what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like", and are discarding those experienced editors who do. Even those who remain but are becoming increasingly disillusioned with all the nonsense that goes on will eventually leave, or create a fork of Wikipedia, and to be honest, if I had the money right now, I'd do it myself, and cast ArbCom in its present form into the bottomless pit.
I used to care about Wikipedia, as did others, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
If money is the problem, I can solve that. I recently came into an inheritance.
Thanks for your interest; it isn't the only expression of support to have reached me. A *fresh* version of Wikipedia is obviously a major step to take, and I have to consider and reconcile the various inputs I've received, and am still receiving, and formulate a proposal document that is going to address the issues, and of course, it will be open for discussion to those who are interested.
My current preference is for a partnership-based model, yet one able to generate revenue and still largely remain within the original objectives of Wikipedia. Squaring the circle may not be possible in this case, and good editors will be lost. Meanwhile, only time will tell whether it works, and that depends on achieving the proper mechanism for moving forward, and sticking to it.
I'm hopefully moving premises shortly, so will be unlikely to be able to fully commit my efforts for about a month; but at least that gives time for interested parties to comment, since this is not something that should be rushed into. However, my spare time, such as it is, will be devoted to this project.
Regards.
On 09/12/11 3:45 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
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.
This all makes Wikispecies the perfect fork. Its contents largely overlap the relevant Wikipedia articles, and it is free to be as different in its treatment of those subjects as it wants. It is rarely the subject of controversy, but just keeps truckin' along. The most frequent complaints are from those who would shut it down as redundant.
Wikipedias in other languages are not required to have content that is the same as English Wikipedia, though I have occasionally heard in the past that they should be better correlated. Ultimately it is this built in diversity that will keep NPOV alive. Perhaps other well defined subject areas should have forks too. Wikis are about diversity.
There is a pervasive fear that forks tend to divide an already tiny community, but I doubt that that is an insurmountable problem. Those who are content with the status quo will remain, and those who see the status quo as stagnation will move. Hopefully they will both attract new people with views in line with their separate missions. To paraphrase a popular daytime TV personality: "It is better to be from a broken wiki than in one."
Ray
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