http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_fork#Forking_free_and_open_source_sof… On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 14:32, Chris Lee <theornamentalist(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ http://snowulf.com/ http://ipv6wiki.net/

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 05:59:34PM -0400, Chris Lee wrote: 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

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

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(a)gmail.com>

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:13:51PM -0700, M. Williamson wrote: 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

M. Williamson, 13/09/2011 00:13: 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 12 September 2011 22:57, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> 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. 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.

David Gerard wrote: 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 Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: 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. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:45 PM, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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 Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:26 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: 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_Summar… 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 Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I believe the correct name for that is the trickle-down effect :) -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com 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 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. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: oh that is alarming. can you tell me more? mike

On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Mike Dupont <jamesmikedupont(a)googlemail.com> wrote: 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: 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.

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:25 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

On 22/09/11 10:12, Andrea Zanni wrote: 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.

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:04 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

On Sep 22, 2011 8:48 PM, "MZMcBride" <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: wrote: is Africa)? Wikiversity Is as thought: improve 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 _______________________________________________

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 8:47 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: 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(a)wikimedia.org

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(a)bruning.xs4all.nl>

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

Well that's exactly the problem :) This should be a last gasp kick up the backside.. not a shrug of the shoulders. Just saying. Tom

David Gerard 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. 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

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:35 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: 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 Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote: 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. 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. 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

Samuel Klein wrote: 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 13 September 2011 00:04, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: 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.

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 &lt;andrew.lih(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip more interesting observations> 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 18:15, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Phil Nash &lt;phnash(a)blueyonder.co.uk&gt; wrote: If money is the problem, I can solve that. I recently came into an inheritance. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

On 09/12/11 3:45 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: 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