English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage. On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your text. If not today then in a year.
Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass. If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the project will never lift off.
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places and propagate sharing.
Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native content before.
That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead to anything making a difference.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
I agree with this analysis.
2011/9/13 me@marcusbuck.org
English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage. On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your text. If not today then in a year.
Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass. If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the project will never lift off.
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places and propagate sharing.
Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native content before.
That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead to anything making a difference.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
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On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 4:37 PM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with this analysis.
2011/9/13 me@marcusbuck.org
English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage. On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your text. If not today then in a year.
Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass. If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the project will never lift off.
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places and propagate sharing.
Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native content before.
That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead to anything making a difference.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
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I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won that race.
The same point applies to Encyclopedias- Wikipedia is proof that just about anyone can contribute to an encyclopedia, not just a published versions by white, old, Academicians and instead refine it, continuously to compete with any other Encyclopedia. Now, the difference of concept between an Encyclopedia and a News source are undeniable, you can not refine a news article and you have to be correct and quick at the same time. The difference is, Wikipedia already does this, breaking stories do link back Wikipedia article from Google News. The difference between the two projects is the number of contributors.
The concept of this movement is based mainly on volunteers. it has proven that random volunteers from around the world can accomplish anything, if we pay people to contribute, it goes against the ethos of all the projects.
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this.
Theo
Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com: <snip>
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this.
Theo
Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the 'global south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse, but on many others we're not.
It is this potential that does matter though - but to achieve that, we should work on it.
But more importantly - you are correct that Wikinews' user base is simply too small. You can theoretically write an encyclopedia with 3 skilled people, as long as you take your time and do a hell lot of research. However, this is not true for a news source - to make that work you always need up to date everything, you need to cover the latest news and have interesting research. If Wikipedia stands still for a week (no edits) we can just continue after that. If the New York Times would do the same, most likely they have lost a lot of their readers. Continuity and masses are even more important for Wikinews than for Wikipedia to make it work.
Therefore, I'm not so sure if forking is good per se. Wikinews was already too small to my liking, and splitting it up might bring the community even further below the critical mass. At the same time it might bring the apparently needed changes for some, and make them work - I do hope though that both communities will quickly figure out what methods work best, and join together again to make it more likely to pass this threshold of activity.
Lodewijk
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.orgwrote:
Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com:
<snip>
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred
languages
and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews
was
never able to capitalize on this.
Theo
Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the 'global south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse, but on many others we're not.
You seem to have misunderstood my point. The diverse base is the number of communities we have, not a mix of it. There are homogeneous language groups and communities, I never disputed that but there are so many of them. It has something to do with sociology, why certain type of individuals or groups gravitate towards certain things. I think you know, but others might not, I am from the Global south. There is something different that attracted me towards the projects. It is and was open for me to join, as I am sure it was for anyone in my part of the world, the difference is, you can not go and get people to care and recruit just for the sake of having diversity. This in no way means the projects are not diverse, there are projects in both my native tongues, I merely chose enwp.
For example, can you tell me how many similar Dutch language projects exist similar to ours? in Netherlands? and from those, who work side-by-side by French, German, Swahili or Hindi? I can make a call to translate and have any message translated in 2 dozen languages within a day. In order to do that, they have to have knowledge of multiple languages and how to edit. These groups exist, there are volunteers in those languages willing to contribute their time for nothing in return, we just can't tap it well enough.
The case of English Wikipedia only echoes what the Dutch projects might have. It *is* the language of old, white intellectuals, all the history of the world reaffirms this notion, most anthropology looked at the world from this perspective and in doing so, negated its own neutrality.
I beg to differ, we most certainly are diverse. You are just looking at a single project or language and trying to find diversity in it, I am saying look at the bigger picture and all the languages. English might be the most widely spoken language and that is why you even have as much diversity as we do now, compared to several other Romance languages you'd find even less diversity in the contributor base, its simply a matter of a larger contributor base. Maybe not on this list or the English Wikipedia as much as we'd like to be, but there are dozens of mailing lists and projects in other language, we are discussing this issue on just one of them.
Theo
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this.
When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, French and Hungarian.
At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can access both current news and a historical archive of news with verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be free-as-in-freedom are good too.
This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the BBC...)
[1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_res... [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
I'm no expert here, but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises. I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians, and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals, especially because, right now, it relies on them.
Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and secondary sources, Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it collects links about (not so recent) news. Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place. As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New York Times website, which is much more update.
I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last a single day, but instead needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill an informative gap, because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different articles on the same subjects, but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them. This could be an interesting direction.
Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia: in case of patent "recentism" (unfortunately, often catastrophic events) people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial facts on something that already happened. If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place where to write all that stuff. Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things have slowed down, relying on the Wikinews article.
My 2cents, obviously.
Aubrey
2011/9/13 Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this.
When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, French and Hungarian.
At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can access both current news and a historical archive of news with verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be free-as-in-freedom are good too.
This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the BBC...)
[1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_res... [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
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On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com wrote:
I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last a single day, but instead needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill an informative gap, because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different articles on the same subjects, but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them. This could be an interesting direction.
A wiki for news that doesn't last a single day, but instead needs a history and a timetable is already done. It's called Wikipedia.
Zitat von Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com:
I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won that race.
My main point was (although I didn't make it overly clear) not that "professionals" do inherently better work than amateurs/volunteers, but that they constantly dedicate eight working hours every day to creating content. That's something you can count on to provide the base load of the critical mass. Most volunteers on the other hand can only dedicate one or two hours a day and only if they have no other obligations. Sometimes volunteers stop contributing for no apparent reason. You cannot create large articles, background pieces or interviews in just one or two hours. That's why professionals are useful.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:03 PM, me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Zitat von Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com:
I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the
playing
field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already
won
that race.
My main point was (although I didn't make it overly clear) not that "professionals" do inherently better work than amateurs/volunteers, but that they constantly dedicate eight working hours every day to creating content. That's something you can count on to provide the base load of the critical mass. Most volunteers on the other hand can only dedicate one or two hours a day and only if they have no other obligations. Sometimes volunteers stop contributing for no apparent reason. You cannot create large articles, background pieces or interviews in just one or two hours. That's why professionals are useful.
My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is
what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
You are also making generalization about volunteers, that they might have only one or two hours to contribute. Even so, there are still thousands of them, many, many more than how many people can be employed at a time.
My argument was, a) paying/hiring staff to edit a project is against the general ethos of our movement b) why only pay Wikinews staff to approach critical mass then? Why not Wikiquote or Wiktionary? or some new project? c) What happens when the staff finishes it's term? who sustains the project then? If people didn't care earlier they are likely to not care later and lastly d) You can not form a community from paid employees, they will leave and when the position ends, who runs the project?
Regards Theo
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find someone who would program that bot?
The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News services regularly have more than 100 news per day.
I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news service is not a news service without constant care, which could be done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not one article on Wikipedia.
On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that
was
built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently
better
work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid, uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 18:19, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid, uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one.
I probably worded it wrongly, but, I think that you didn't get my point anyway. One thing is to do boring job, the same thing is to have responsibility for taken job, even it's about voluntarism; completely other thing is to do that on time for prolonged period of time. If it's not about really really motivating task (I mean, you could find such volunteers if it's about sex), it's hard to organize <whichever number> of volunteers to do something in particular time frame.
The problem is the next: * There is a need to have news every day and to keep eye on important events 24/7. * Note that it's not about regular stewards' night shift, when we have bots and users who warn us about irregularities and that the most complex irregular tasks require 10-15 minutes of doing simple things, like clicking on right links is. * Take as many volunteers as you want and give them the task to care about it. * Try to cover 24/7.
It is likely that you'll need ~5 persons per small amount of time (let's say, one hour per day) + some people to replace the core editors for weekends or so -- to be sure that everything is covered and that volunteers are still motivated as they don't have too harsh tasks. That's around 100-200 highly involved persons, which is around the top Wikipedias -- as 100 edits/month is not enough for being "highly involved": 10 edits per workday makes more than 200 edits requirement and I don't think that any of Wikipedia editors think that their productive Wikipedian day was when they made 10 edits. Now, just imagine how many edits have to be made during *one* day to create a decent news story. And note that you'll have to *organize* them, actually, unlike in the Wikipedia case.
In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only other option is to hire someone to do that job.
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only other option is to hire someone to do that job.
Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature 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 -- 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 eventualism are at odds with each other.
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
-Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
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 eventualism are at odds with each other.
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
-Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd experiences, etc.
It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
Sarah
The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical mass of editors to overcome these issues.
So...
you could have a strict review system; if there were enough good reviewers you could cover a broad spectrum of news; if there were enough editors you could implement collaborative & freely edited original content; if there was enough interested editors
The problem is that Wikinews already has a high barrier to entry - it doesn't fit a model of casual contribution once or twice a week (or month).
Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an encyclopaedia doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a more leisurely model.
For "news" that model does not simply cut-n-paste across.
Tom
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical mass of editors to overcome these issues.
So...
Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an encyclopaedia doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a more leisurely model.
Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due to lack of it?
sincerely, Kim Bruning
On 14 September 2011 18:34, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup.
Yes, and that went really well, didn't it? ;)
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:26:42PM +0100, Thomas Dalton wrote:
On 14 September 2011 18:34, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup.
Yes, and that went really well, didn't it? ;)
Apart from some minor issues with people fighting over credit O:-); yes, that went astoundingly well, in fact!
sincerely, Kim Bruning
Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through community efforts with no paid editors.
2011/9/14 Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical mass of editors to overcome these issues.
So...
Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an
encyclopaedia
doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a more leisurely model.
Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due to lack of it?
sincerely, Kim Bruning
--
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I'm hesitate to chime in, not only I've kept saying I'm on a wikibreak - but I'm really on a break, my doctor said I had to give a full rest and no new task anymore till the time allows again! - but also I'd been inactive on Wikinews, but let me point some out.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:21 AM, M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through community efforts with no paid editors.
1) Regardless how you esteem their achievement, Italian speaking community decided to draw a line in "the area both Wikipedia and Wikinews cover". They eliminated "Current Events" type page on the Italian Wikipedia and any fresh ongoing things should be only accepted onto the Italian Wikinews. (check your farovite Wikipedia "Current Events" page to see if you find a link to the Italian equivalent).
2) Everyone has its own systematic bias. Major media too. Even on a certain Wikinews edition short of original reports, carefully synthesized media reports could help readership to widen their view to the things falling out from major media available in their language(s), if such is available on Wikinews).
On the other side, both media and publishers are doing more than writing articles: there is a lot of things to maintain. Behind most of major successful Wikipedias I'd point out such people behind the stage are working, from the WMF staffers to Chapter paid people. It would be a topic worth to discuss sister projects including Wikinews are being paid attention as much as Wikipedia in regard of maintenance and outreach.
Cheers,
2011/9/14 Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical mass of editors to overcome these issues.
So...
Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an
encyclopaedia
doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a more leisurely model.
Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due to lack of it?
sincerely, Kim Bruning
--
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On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 03:21:23PM -0700, M. Williamson wrote:
Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through community efforts with no paid editors.
True, but they were seeded by people from the original en.wp, which was already running at that time (and which had originally been seeded by paid editing, and the occaisional data dump from nupedia and gnupedia) Also, the requirements for wikinews might be much different from those of wikipedia, and need a different seed group.
sincerly, Kim Bruning
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
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 eventualism are at odds with each other.
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
-Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd experiences, etc.
It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
I agree, and to quote from my reply in another thread:
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
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.
-Andrew
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
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 eventualism are at odds with each other.
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
-Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd experiences, etc.
It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
I agree, and to quote from my reply in another thread:
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
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.
-Andrew
Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain questions to those women?
That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us a whole new depth of coverage.
This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without stifling early efforts.
Sarah
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain questions to those women?
That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us a whole new depth of coverage.
This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without stifling early efforts.
Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's very much in line with this.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations http://vimeo.com/26469276
Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing typed words.
-Andrew
On Thursday 15 September 2011 12:40 AM, Andrew Lih wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarahslimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lihandrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain questions to those women?
That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us a whole new depth of coverage.
This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without stifling early efforts.
Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's very much in line with this.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations http://vimeo.com/26469276
Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing typed words.
I've been following the Wikinews discussion, and I've been hesitant to comment only because I know so little about it. The little I know tells me that it could be something great, and perhaps the reason it's not quite there yet is because it was ahead of it's time. Turn on the television news today and it's routine to see tweet-ins and live comment feeds from other social media; indeed, a significant chunk of what mainstream American television channels report these days is feedback as journalism. The other big thing happening here in India, for instance, is citizen journalism - a tired, catch-all phrase but nevertheless a firm reality - which forms at least two hours of every major news channel's content per day.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the Wikinews model. But Wikinews started up in 2004...while Twitter was founded only in 2006, Apple's Iphone only hit the market in 2007...and much of the infrastructure that could enable the Wikinews model of journalism in mainstream media was built much after Wikinews was founded as a project. I don't know enough about Wikinews and what's plaguing it currently, but as an outsider it would seem to me that it has the potential to be something really significant.
As for oral citations, or the idea of using audio and video interviews to record knowledge, all of us who worked on the project would be delighted if there were unintended consequences to the project, like perhaps being of use to Wikinews, which is not something we thought about at the outset. Michel (Castelo Branco) suggested earlier that as Wikinews explicitly allows original research as a policy, it could be used as a workaround for oral citations on Wikipedia. We don't have fixed ideas about this and welcome discussion in general - though I think there is value in facing the boundaries of citation on Wikipedia squarely. We would like to offer up the project as a way to confront the limitations of citations as currently allowed, the problem of knowledge that isn't published in print, and, in time, open up a larger discussion on this. (We'll be soon posting a wrap-up of the oral citations project once a few things are done).
A related - and interesting - problem/opportunity is the vast amount of audio-video archival material that already exists in the world, almost none of which has any direct effect on Wikipedia. In most cases, tapping into the 'raw' archive would be disallowed within Wikipedia on the grounds of it constituting a 'primary source'. (This is also a problem for Wikipedians who'd like to use private archives - even corporate archives - as sources, but can't). But there is nothing to say that Wikinews could not tap into this vast pool of curated material and create 'news' out of it. In general, it would appear that Wikinews has a set of very flexible policies and practices, and it seems as if they could be put to boundless good use.
Cheers, Achal
-Andrew
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On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala aprabhala@gmail.com wrote:
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the Wikinews model.
No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool. Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork.
Quality is important, but Wikinews seems to consider it important enough to die for.
- d.
On Thursday 15 September 2011 01:43 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhalaaprabhala@gmail.com wrote:
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the Wikinews model.
No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool. Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork.
The hazards of not knowing about how Wikinews works I guess :) But I think it would be right to say that Wikinews - at least in a citizen journalism context - was far ahead of mainstream media; behind Indymedia, but ahead of many others. And that the reason I haven't been to Indymedia (or read anything significant from there in a long time) is also possibly because it was ahead of the curve, i.e. ahead of the infrastructure that could have really enabled it?
Quality is important, but Wikinews seems to consider it important enough to die for.
- d.
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On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:52 AM, Achal Prabhala aprabhala@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday 15 September 2011 01:43 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhalaaprabhala@gmail.com wrote:
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the Wikinews model.
No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool. Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork.
The hazards of not knowing about how Wikinews works I guess :) But I think it would be right to say that Wikinews - at least in a citizen journalism context - was far ahead of mainstream media; behind Indymedia, but ahead of many others. And that the reason I haven't been to Indymedia (or read anything significant from there in a long time) is also possibly because it was ahead of the curve, i.e. ahead of the infrastructure that could have really enabled it?
Ahh.....Blogs? News-aggregators?
'Citizen journalism' etc. and repeatedly calling it ahead of the curve seems rather hyperbolic. Are you forgetting an entire generation of bloggers that dominated the mainstream media and continue to do.
Theo
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:32 AM, Achal Prabhala aprabhala@gmail.com wrote:
I've been following the Wikinews discussion, and I've been hesitant to comment only because I know so little about it. The little I know tells me that it could be something great, and perhaps the reason it's not quite there yet is because it was ahead of it's time. Turn on the television news today and it's routine to see tweet-ins and live comment feeds from other social media; indeed, a significant chunk of what mainstream American television channels report these days is feedback as journalism. The other big thing happening here in India, for instance, is citizen journalism - a tired, catch-all phrase but nevertheless a firm reality - which forms at least two hours of every major news channel's content per day.
It really wasn't ahead of it's time. It is actually quiet behind its time. Amateur news, bloggers broke that barrier much before.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the Wikinews model. But Wikinews started up in 2004...while Twitter was founded only in 2006, Apple's Iphone only hit the market in 2007...and much of the infrastructure that could enable the Wikinews model of journalism in mainstream media was built much after Wikinews was founded as a project. I don't know enough about Wikinews and what's plaguing it currently, but as an outsider it would seem to me that it has the potential to be something really significant.
I disagree, the world follows instant news model. News is faster than it has even been, free and available in every conceivable format. You are treating Wikinews as some distinct model, it really isn't. It's a wiki where they add news instead of articles, nothing more. Let me tell you, what's plaguing it currently- The review process.
As for oral citations, or the idea of using audio and video interviews to record knowledge, all of us who worked on the project would be delighted if there were unintended consequences to the project, like perhaps being of use to Wikinews, which is not something we thought about at the outset. Michel (Castelo Branco) suggested earlier that as Wikinews explicitly allows original research as a policy, it could be used as a workaround for oral citations on Wikipedia. We don't have fixed ideas about this and welcome discussion in general - though I think there is value in facing the boundaries of citation on Wikipedia squarely. We would like to offer up the project as a way to confront the limitations of citations as currently allowed, the problem of knowledge that isn't published in print, and, in time, open up a larger discussion on this. (We'll be soon posting a wrap-up of the oral citations project once a few things are done).
I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.
A related - and interesting - problem/opportunity is the vast amount of audio-video archival material that already exists in the world, almost none of which has any direct effect on Wikipedia. In most cases, tapping into the 'raw' archive would be disallowed within Wikipedia on the grounds of it constituting a 'primary source'. (This is also a problem for Wikipedians who'd like to use private archives - even corporate archives - as sources, but can't). But there is nothing to say that Wikinews could not tap into this vast pool of curated material and create 'news' out of it. In general, it would appear that Wikinews has a set of very flexible policies and practices, and it seems as if they could be put to boundless good use.
Wikinews policies aren't the problem. Wikipedia will still not accept them and it should not. You can also try Wiktionary or Wikiquote. The issue is the research is original, not peer-reviewed or published by a reputable third party and hence, would remain a primary source. And no, Wikinews will not be able to tap into the raw pool. That would be a different project all together. Since covering archives and Breaking news stories are two very separate areas.
Theo
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.
The no original research policy was never intended to keep out material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal view of what that means.
Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and not interpreted.
Sarah
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is
not
a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.
The no original research policy was never intended to keep out material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal view of what that means.
Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and not interpreted.
Sarah
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I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those standards.
Now I wonder who I can cite for this picture of Bigfoot(allegedly) I found somewhere.
Theo
On Sep 14, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Theo10011 wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and not interpreted.
Sarah
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I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those standards.
I'm not sure how this is related to the multimedia and images question? Will having multimedia illustrating an article mean that we have more cure-alls and diet-pills articles? Or is this a slippery-slope argument?
Now I wonder who I can cite for this picture of Bigfoot(allegedly) I found somewhere.
Theo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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On 09/14/11 5:01 PM, Heather Ford wrote:
On Sep 14, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Theo10011 wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarahslimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and not interpreted.
I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those standards.
I'm not sure how this is related to the multimedia and images question? Will having multimedia illustrating an article mean that we have more cure-alls and diet-pills articles? Or is this a slippery-slope argument?
I suppose such articles have their place, as do the manufacturer's own research and accumulated testimonials. Stating where the information is from is also important. If we can find no independent scientific research about the product we should state that too. The public needs to know this.
Ray
On 09/14/11 1:44 PM, Sarah wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011de10011@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.
The no original research policy was never intended to keep out material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal view of what that means.
NOR began as a way of dealing with physics cranks, but by trying to define such policies mare accurately we too easily pervert its intention. A fashionable criticism is that someone introducing a different perspective is engaging in original research. That can lead to acrimonious and futile debates about the nature of original research and opinion. Yes, we want original photos as a way of avoiding copyright problems, but at the same time people complain about primary textual sources.
Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and not interpreted.
Any inherent POV is in the selection process. The choice needs to be short enough to avoid overwhelming the article, but if it's too short we risk the complaint of being out of context. The full interview needs to be readily available somewhere to enable verification not only of accuracy but also of context.
Ray
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 13:10, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain questions to those women?
That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us a whole new depth of coverage.
This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without stifling early efforts.
Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's very much in line with this.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations http://vimeo.com/26469276
Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing typed words.
-Andrew
I think the oral citation project is a wonderful idea. I would extend it to the whole world, including areas rich in written sources, because there are always stories out there that give you more depth.
The student project you describe would be a great resource to add to the Wikipedia article. Could it be done?
Sarah
On 09/14/11 11:10 AM, Sarah wrote:
There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd experiences, etc.
It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
This is an interesting point. In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs. We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far more efficiently than ever. The victim has been that long informative letters and diaries have become a thing of the past. When that happens who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'. The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."
The narrative may be flawed and biased. Similar narratives by others who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way. There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to get together to build a playground or other needed community facility. Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of today's world without falling into gnosis?
Ray
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
This is an interesting point. In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs. We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far more efficiently than ever. The victim has been that long informative letters and diaries have become a thing of the past. When that happens who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'. The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."
The narrative may be flawed and biased. Similar narratives by others who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way. There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to get together to build a playground or other needed community facility. Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of today's world without falling into gnosis?
Even if we would allow such as a resource, doing so would hardly do justice to these reports. It would be possible to get one or two facts from such a report, and I think it should be possible to do so, but publishing the report either as a whole or in a complete summary would be problematic both from a "No Original Research" perspective and from a relevancy perspective. In the end, it is Wikipedia's task to make existing knowledge more widely available, not to create new knowledge.
There should definitely be places where this material belongs, and in many cases there are (I think of local historical societies, for example). The question is, whether or not the WMF should aim to have such a place itself. I have my doubts about it, because it does not look like an area where our strongpoint (massive volunteer cooperation) has much additionial value, but if the answer is yes, I think it should be as a new project - including it in any of the existing projects would widen its scope so far that it would water it down.
On 09/15/11 11:51 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Ray Saintongesaintonge@telus.net wrote:
This is an interesting point. In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs. We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far more efficiently than ever. The victim has been that long informative letters and diaries have become a thing of the past. When that happens who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'. The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."
The narrative may be flawed and biased. Similar narratives by others who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way. There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to get together to build a playground or other needed community facility. Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of today's world without falling into gnosis?
Even if we would allow such as a resource, doing so would hardly do justice to these reports. It would be possible to get one or two facts from such a report, and I think it should be possible to do so, but publishing the report either as a whole or in a complete summary would be problematic both from a "No Original Research" perspective and from a relevancy perspective. In the end, it is Wikipedia's task to make existing knowledge more widely available, not to create new knowledge.
There should definitely be places where this material belongs, and in many cases there are (I think of local historical societies, for example). The question is, whether or not the WMF should aim to have such a place itself. I have my doubts about it, because it does not look like an area where our strongpoint (massive volunteer cooperation) has much additionial value, but if the answer is yes, I think it should be as a new project - including it in any of the existing projects would widen its scope so far that it would water it down.
I'm completely open to the notion that this could be on a completely different project from Wikinews.
Anything other than publishing as a whole would require some serious POV editing. Who would decide on what the important facts are? Nor is this a question of creating knowledge; the knowledge was there already in the mind of the person being interviewed. The relevance can only be judged in the context of other similar memoirs about the same events.
Teaming up with local historical societies would be important. I'm sure that many of them are already sitting on large collections of this material, and making it available is beyond their abilities. Massive volunteer cooperation is just as important to them as to us, but they have typically drawn from a different demographic.
If we can send people into communities to take pictures of every important building, it should be just as possible to send them there to collect stories.
For the U.S., given Obama's push on job creation, the W.P.A.'s cultural programs in the 1930s could be a great example.
Ray
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet running. There is nothing artificial in that.
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet running. There is nothing artificial in that.
That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.
I'd argue that deadline-oriented news, being time critical and reliant on single observers, is inherently a misfit with wiki principles of eventualism, and the collaborative "magic."
Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be great to see more moves into that area.
-Andrew
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet running. There is nothing artificial in that.
That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.
"running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF (in relation to content projects, of course).
The problem is, of course, that it's hard to move out from the Wikipedia-centric perspective; and that move will be needed soon for Wikipedia itself.
Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care about things when no one else is able to care.
I'd argue that deadline-oriented news, being time critical and reliant on single observers, is inherently a misfit with wiki principles of eventualism, and the collaborative "magic."
Nothing is perfect. That person shouldn't be the only one who does that. Such person should be just someone on which the project could default if nobody else is able to do that.
Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be great to see more moves into that area.
Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass around it.
On 09/15/11 8:50 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lihandrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.
"running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF (in relation to content projects, of course).
This just brings us back to the function of the WMF. At one it was just a matter of keeping the servers running, and ensuring that the content remains available forever. To the discomfort of some that role has expanded.
Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care about things when no one else is able to care.
I don't know about that. Wikisource already has more scanned books available than it can handle, even if we just limit ourselves to those where the public domain status is absolutely indisputable. A relatively small numbers should still be scanned for the sake of comprehensiveness. The big challenge is in how to make this useful to a larger audience.
I don't see a big money issue for Wiktionary either.
The WM-CA medicine project still comes down to one dedicated person funding the scholarship. For now it's experimental, but its future depends on an analysis of the current experiment.
The fact remains that none of your examples involves hiring someone. What's the point of hiring someone for Wikinews before we even know where it's heading. The volunteer community would still need to define that person's job.
Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be great to see more moves into that area.
Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass around it.
Collectively I'm sure we can do better than one feature per month. If Serbian Wikinews can do something different that's fine too.
Ray
On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
On 09/15/11 8:50 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care about things when no one else is able to care.
I don't know about that. Wikisource already has more scanned books available than it can handle, even if we just limit ourselves to those where the public domain status is absolutely indisputable. A relatively small numbers should still be scanned for the sake of comprehensiveness. The big challenge is in how to make this useful to a larger audience.
It is true that we have more English scanned books than we could transcribe in a hundred years, but there are many languages which have very few scanned books available online, and there are some important English works which are not available as scans yet.
-- John Vandenberg
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 21:38, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I don't see a big money issue for Wiktionary either.
It's not about big money, it's about money necessary for a project to live.
Targeting articles in medicine is quite good, as they are necessary and not covered as well as, for example, astronomy is. But, it shows that even English Wikipedia requires organized (not spontaneous) work to cover some areas of knowledge. Wikinews needs it for the roots.
Hi Milos
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:18 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work
is
what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we
still
be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get
paid
to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
You are arguing that volunteers do not care about accuracy, I think that's a sweeping assessment for a very wide spectrum of volunteers. What about the hundred of editors covering breaking news stories on enwp by the minute? Would you like to dispute that they don't care or strive for accuracy as a story develops?
Yes, more volunteer position were replaced by paid staff, that did not necessarily make things any efficient. I can instead argue it created un-necessary bureaucracy and hierarchy where it didn't exist before and made things more inefficient. A lot of people would dispute if there is wisdom in replacing tasks that are handled by volunteers with staff- OTRS, IRC, certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1] In the mean time, there is an entire community department with more than a dozen staff members yet the appearance is, it is still preferable that the community handle it.
For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find someone who would program that bot?
That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors. Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care about what happens next.
The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News services regularly have more than 100 news per day.
I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators, micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not hard if you know how to tap into it.
I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news service is not a news service without constant care, which could be done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not one article on Wikipedia.
My point still stands, you can not sustain a project on paid staff. If you do, it is not a wiki, or a community, just office work.
Theo
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2#Election_Committee
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1]
Stewards had difficulties because Cary is not Volunteer Coordinator anymore, although organizing elections is not too hard task. Cary organized the first elections in 2011, although he was not VC anymore. 2009-2010 were not so bright years for stewards. *Fortunately*, on last two elections we've got a couple of stewards who deal more with stewards meta issues, although both elections were on the edge not to be held. Just because of Cary we had those elections.
That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors. Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care about what happens next.
The same is with positions which require more specific organizational and professional knowledge than just writing articles in wiki code. Editing encyclopedia is quite different than editing news edition. Tasks of Wikinews editors (not journalists/contributors, editors) are comparable to the tasks of WMF management. You have to have employed people to take care about paying bills, otherwise you won't have servers. Similarly, you have to have people who care about integrity of Wikinews, otherwise you won't have functional news source.
While I prefer to see volunteers to do the job, I would be happy to explain to one employee (better from community background than not) how to program, maintain and develop those bots.
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation. We shouldn't stray away from that.
So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?
The answer on this question is the same as above. Did we abandon Wikipedia just because it was necessary to have WMF employees?
I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would be Wikinews community.
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators, micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not hard if you know how to tap into it.
Wikinews can compete with large sites. And not just that! Wikinews is the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day (there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future more than any other project.
On 15 September 2011 05:12, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation. We shouldn't stray away from that.
So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?
The answer on this question is the same as above. Did we abandon Wikipedia just because it was necessary to have WMF employees?
I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would be Wikinews community.
Wikipedia has never had paid staff writing content, which is what was suggested for Wikinews. The community doesn't need managing, it needs to be large enough to produce enough content to attract readers (some of whom will then become writers, and the project will become self-sustaining).
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 14:34, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia has never had paid staff writing content, which is what was suggested for Wikinews. The community doesn't need managing, it needs to be large enough to produce enough content to attract readers (some of whom will then become writers, and the project will become self-sustaining).
Wikipedia is attractive without having to add 100 articles per day which won't be interesting tomorrow and without large community. Proof for that are many smaller Wikipedias.
Not everything is working on voluntarism exclusively: among them, servers and creating very large community around news service which doesn't have news.
And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the beginning.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the beginning.
Did I say this? I don't remember saying so.
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
-Andrew
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
In fact, if you look at the process-heavy system that Wikinews has created over the years, and the desire to have paid staff be part of the team, the more it resembles Nupedia.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:52, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
In fact, if you look at the process-heavy system that Wikinews has created over the years, and the desire to have paid staff be part of the team, the more it resembles Nupedia.
I didn't create those rules, but some of the things behind those rules have sense. Flagged revisions were introduced just because Wikinews could be treated as relevant source of information, not blogs, by Google.
I am not highly involved on English Wikinews and it shouldn't be interpreted that en.wn community wants paid staff just because that's my position.
I agree that structural changes are needed, but I don't think that they are enough. Wikinews was popular just at the beginning of its existence, while Wikipedia hype was at the top. Many of the present rules didn't exist when Wikinews went down.
BTW, you are using Nupedia as archetype for "something wrong". While it proved to be wrong, you are missing a lot of things if when you compare one encyclopedia with one news outlet.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the beginning.
Did I say this? I don't remember saying so.
I thought that it was you in some of the threads, but I missed.
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself. Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up very initial rules.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself. Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up very initial rules.¨
Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of the history...
The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he was doing more harm than good.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself. Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up very initial rules.¨
Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of the history...
The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he was doing more harm than good.
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
Were you editing back then? My memory is quite different. He says on his user page, "I named it, crafted much of the policy that now guides the project, and led the project for its first year." which accords with my memory.
If you look at his early edits I think an accurate picture could be reconstructed, although the mailing lists played a much more significant role back then.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribu...
Fred
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself. Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up very initial rules.¨
Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of the history...
The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he was doing more harm than good.
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
Were you editing back then? My memory is quite different. He says on his user page, "I named it, crafted much of the policy that now guides the project, and led the project for its first year." which accords with my memory.
If you look at his early edits I think an accurate picture could be reconstructed, although the mailing lists played a much more significant roll back then.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribu...
Haha, no, I wasn't editing tnen, but since quite a few years after that time, and definitely up to the time when I started, you couldn't delete revision by revision, a person curious like myself was able to get a reasonably non-distorted view of the history. Arguably The Cunctator has a much larger claim to having shaped the ethos of Wikipedia in those early days than Sanger. Certainly The Cunctators vision reigned supreme until these latter disturbing times when it seems Sangers vision is re-asserting itself over Wikinews and sad to say over Wikipedia too. Do you recall Sangers obsession about how wikipedia should be "family friendly"?
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 15:07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself. Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up very initial rules.¨
Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of the history...
"not so, not so =" "You like Sanger" and "it should be forgot"? :P
The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he was doing more harm than good.
One thing is what he wanted, the other is what he did. He created the roots of Wikipedia, no matter if he preferred Nupedia.
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the beginning.
Did I say this? I don't remember saying so.
In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
-Andrew
Actually Larry Sanger was on the payroll of Bomis for a while when Wikipedia was starting, perhaps as long a year. During that time Nupedia was still operating.
Fred
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 06:12, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would be Wikinews community.
I think that the syntax in the last sentence is broken: The sense is that managers of the employee(s) should be Wikinews community.
On 09/14/11 9:12 PM, Milos Rancic wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators, micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not hard if you know how to tap into it.
Wikinews can compete with large sites. And not just that! Wikinews is the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day (there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future more than any other project.
I don't think that the Serbian situation scales very well. 100 news articles per day is even a lot for readers to handle. Serbian project success depends a lot on the language/country correlation. It also does not take long to get from Belgrade to the furthest part of the country. A New Zealand wikinews buried in a larger English language project won't attract a lot of attention outside New Zealand.
Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within minutes of the event. That article and many corrections went on line immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.
Ray
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 19:59, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within minutes of the event. That article and many corrections went on line immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.
Not to toot my own horn, but in the run up to the UK tuition fees debate in Parliament, I wrote a longish synthesis article for English Wikinews on the topic which tried to basically give a synthesis of all the important parts of the debate at the time:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_Parliament_to_vote_on_tuition_fee_rise_on_Thu...
It eventually became a featured article.
To do news effectively, we need to be able to handle breaking news as it breaks, produce detailed synthesis articles and have them approved before major events (so people can be informed citizens about those events), and provide useful original reporting.
I'm not convinced that English Wikinews is fundamentally broken though: if we can find a way of breaking the review bottleneck, it becomes simply a matter of throwing more people at the problem.
I agree with Theo, at least to an extent. It seems to me that there is an *eternal* competition even between professional offerings to offer not only the latest news, but the best news. On the other hand, I do agree that I'm reluctant to use even the English Wikinews for informational purposes as the articles aren't old compared to the time when they became effective, but simply out of date. Sometimes, I don't find any technology articles from the past month.
~K
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 7:34 AM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 4:37 PM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with this analysis.
2011/9/13 me@marcusbuck.org
English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage. On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your text. If not today then in a year.
Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass. If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the project will never lift off.
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places and propagate sharing.
Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native content before.
That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead to anything making a difference.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
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I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won that race.
The same point applies to Encyclopedias- Wikipedia is proof that just about anyone can contribute to an encyclopedia, not just a published versions by white, old, Academicians and instead refine it, continuously to compete with any other Encyclopedia. Now, the difference of concept between an Encyclopedia and a News source are undeniable, you can not refine a news article and you have to be correct and quick at the same time. The difference is, Wikipedia already does this, breaking stories do link back Wikipedia article from Google News. The difference between the two projects is the number of contributors.
The concept of this movement is based mainly on volunteers. it has proven that random volunteers from around the world can accomplish anything, if we pay people to contribute, it goes against the ethos of all the projects.
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this.
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And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your text. If not today then in a year.
Sometimes people look for old news, but our category system in Wikinews is not too good (alphabetical). Bugzilla knows this problem for years.
But - click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:Random
and next use http://stats.grok.se/
Articles in en Wikinews are more popular, than articles in smaller Wikipedias
przykuta
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24, me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I said, heresy, For his ears :P
The main difference between Wikipedia (projects with similar dynamics) and Wikinews is necessity for maintenance. And that's -- huh.
Serbian Wikinews is driving on deal with the news agency Beta and bot which I wrote. But, for ~10 days it doesn't have content added by bot because formatting of Beta pages changed. I have to: (1) remember on which server I run that bot; maybe password, as well; (2) analyze four years old code; (3) change it; (4) but, most importantly, I have to have free time for that. And willingness.
Now, imagine news source without that bot and with necessity to have news between ultra important events. Five persons would be needed to cover 24/7, not counting editor. But, let's say that we just need those 5 persons and that editors would be people from the community. ~40 stewards, volunteers, are able to cover most important issues 24/7, mostly. And stewards are volunteers of the system which works.
Wikinews is not working and up to ~10 days ago the only useful Wikinews -- as general source of information -- was Serbian Wikinews and just thanks to the deal with a news agency and one bot. I tried to do the same with English Wikinews, but, maintaining harvester from a couple of sources is a job which uses a lot of time, on daily basis. (Still, if anyone with Python knowledge is willing to share workload with me to cover English [and other] Wikinews editions, I am still willing to activate bots.)
On 13 September 2011 13:06, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24, me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I said, heresy, For his ears :P
If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation. We shouldn't stray away from that.
So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?
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