By failing I mean that it never achieved any sort of siginificant presence. When Wikinews was started it was, imho, to shunt news off the main project into its own space. News by it's nature is far more verbose then encyclopedic material. News inundates you constantly, while encyclopedic material is more placid and stable.
News should be far more material. And yet the English Wikinews has only 15 thousand articles. So something seriously went wrong in that approach. It simply did not capture the attention of any significant part of the core community.
It's a bit silly to talk about three thousand links, when we have over three million articles. So that's one tenth of one percent? In terms of news outlets, our own news outlet gets a trivial number of links compared to others. And it's ours! That's my point. That's what I consider failing. Crawling along with your tongue out in the desert, while the nearest water is 20 miles away.
Better to re-focus attention on those projects which are successful, than have ten non-successful projects dragging off any resources at all.
Will
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:55 AM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote: <snip>
Better to re-focus attention on those projects which are successful, than have ten non-successful projects dragging off any resources at all.
What resources? With only ~1.5M hits per month, EN Wikinews' share of the tech / internet services budget probably only comes to a couple thousand dollars per year, in other words basically a rounding error in the budget. At the same time, many of the volunteer resources might simply be lost rather than going to work elsewhere, since volunteers are hard to redirect.
In a $6 million budget, I'd honestly be disappointed if the Foundation wasn't spending at least $100k on development projects that might some day take off, and I certainly wouldn't begrudge Wikinews a share of that. One of the virtues of the Foundation is that existing infrastructure makes it very cheap to experiment and try some ideas to see what sticks.
-Robert rohde
Robert Rohde wrote:
What resources? With only ~1.5M hits per month, EN Wikinews' share of the tech / internet services budget probably only comes to a couple thousand dollars per year, in other words basically a rounding error in the budget.
I'd guess it's less than that. I just calculated cost/pageview numbers for a client that serves a lot of pages, and adding the Wikinews traffic to their load would cost them maybe $40/month, even including a share of hardware costs.
I don't have the WMF numbers handy to do the equivalent comparison, but I wouldn't be surprised if WMF page views were an order of magnitude cheaper given their scale and their non-profit status.
Either way, it's plausible Wikinews covers its own expenses through generated donations. Shutting it down would also have costs, both financial and reputational. So the question for me isn't so much, "should we keep it running?" but, "why would we pay to kill it?"
William
2009/11/5 WJhonson@aol.com:
By failing I mean that it never achieved any sort of siginificant presence. When Wikinews was started it was, imho, to shunt news off the main project into its own space.
In your opinion? i.e., not necessarily in anyone else's.
Better to re-focus attention on those projects which are successful, than have ten non-successful projects dragging off any resources at all.
That you are upset at being moderated on their mailing list does not make volunteer effort fungible.
- d.
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