+our goal is to spread this knowledge freely to all humanity. People knowing of our existence is a prerequisite to them using our knowledge. +We get attention, and hence donations Your point on immediatism is a problem for WP, but is the whole purpose of WN. If more contributors were aware of the split here, and tried to keep "breaking news" on WN, and then moved to WP after the story has settled down and the page been locked, then there would be less of a problem and more inter-project coordination. Breaking news simply is not, and should not be, the purview of Wikipedia. --Andrew Whitworth

This is really a wikipedia-l or wikien-l thread, as non-Wikipedias don't really have a popularity problem. At the same time, though, Wikipedia and/or the English Wikipedia don't really have a governing structure, so talking about structured change on those threads is kind of pointless. But I'll let the moderators decide whether or not this thread should be moved. On Dec 16, 2007 10:03 AM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think that's by far the strongest argument against intentionally being less popular. But it seems so easily solved. Have two sites, one for building the content and a separate one for distributing the finished pieces of it to all humanity. Stable versions can be seen as an attempt to get there, but I haven't seen a good implementation of it yet. Separating the building of the content from the distribution of it is a radical change - I don't see it being adequately achieved through a gradual and compromise-filled process.

There are a number of issues that would need addressed in stable versions to make it an appropriate mechanism to meet Google News' indexing requirements, and a static view may be equally problematic. First, Google requires an indexing number within the news item URL, IIRC 5 digits or more. This - to my way of thinking - would be best met by serving up a URL containing the flagged revision's id. If a non-logged in user requests this page and a later version is currently flagged a supercedes header should be returned to the browser. Second, from looking at the test wiki for F.R. it seems the usual configuration is you can't flag until you have a certain edit count, and been on-wiki for a certain time. This isn't appropriate for an editorial review team. We have a number of people who I'd trust fully with the buttons on their home language, but not on en. where it is their 3rd or 4th language. Everyone on the editorial team would meet these criteria, but not everyone meeting these criteria should be on the editorial team. I've emailed Jimmy asking if he has contacts at Google since an effort to get them to discuss getting us listed with appropriate measures in place has not been responded to. If there is anyone else on-list who has contacts I'd appreciate an introduction. Ask.com and Yahoo now aggregate Wikinews content. I'm sure we can combine meeting Google's standards with a drive to better quality. As a last point I'm vaguely aware that live feeds are sold on to a number of search sites. I have no idea if a flagging update would be passed on in that feed and this may be an important issue for both Wikinews and Wikipedia. Brian McNeil -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Whitworth Sent: 16 December 2007 17:15 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us? On Dec 16, 2007 11:04 AM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: This is why I've taken such an interest in projects such as veropedia, and why I've been pushing to do the same kind of thing (sans advertising) for Wikibooks/Wikijunior. At the very least, it would be a substantial boon to these two projects to offer a stable "release version". Wikinews, also would benefit from something like this, first because not being editable would help with their google news issues, and they already lock old stories anyway. Maybe it's becoming high-time the WMF considered adding such an option to some of it's projects. Adding a sub-domain, such as "en.stable.wikibooks.org" or even a sub-folder "en.wikibooks.org/stable" would go a long way to helping several of the projects (and having pages which are basically static would probably have a helpful effect in reducing server load). --Andrew Whitworth _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Dec 16, 2007 11:15 AM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)gmail.com> wrote: A separate sub-domain would probably make it easier for the search engines to keep separate quality ranks for the different sites. I don't know if any of them do this for sub-folders.

The use of a blog is not helping promote Wikinews. It has a pitiful pagerank compared to the main site and unless you hit on a lot of words in an article title it appears well down the results list. The same issue would impact any separate "stable" site, a sub-page less so. I'm sure there are others on-list who have a far better understanding of the ins and outs of pagerank and other search engine's ranking methods but as I understand it Wikinews gains a lot from crosslinking with Wikipedia whereas we might lose this if we're using a static site. Brian McNeil -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Whitworth Sent: 16 December 2007 17:42 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us? serving buttons not These are both compelling reasons for a separate website, or a separate section of the existing wikinews website, should be created. Think of Veropedia as a guide for this. You create news stories on-wiki at Wikinews, and then you move them over to the static website, after they have been properly checked. This is similar to how Wikinews currently uses a blog that must be manually updated to show the most current wikinews stories. The list of people with upload access to the static site would be small, and likely selected by the community directly (as opposed to simple technical requirements). Once hosted in a separate place, they could be given indexing numbers, properly forwarded to the correct locations, etc. --Andrew Whitworth _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Andrew Whitworth wrote: Ineed, this is certainly something we should explore... -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)

Hoi, Please ... the best way to spread knowledge is not for people reading en.wikipedia. English is the language with the most resources on the Internet. Arguably our content in Bangla is more relevant. So be nice and indicate that the best thing for people to do is read any of our projects. (etc does not cover it) Thanks, GerardM On Dec 16, 2007 8:09 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 16/12/2007, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think "etc." does cover it. I mentioned the most visited of our sites, it seemed to be a sensible choice. I wanted to give a url, rather than just say "our projects" to make it clear I was talking about the online versions, rather than any of the various schemes for making them available offline (which are extremely important, but I think less important than the online versions - I'm open to being persuaded otherwise on that point, though).

On 16/12/2007, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: http://leuksman.com/log/ - d.

On 16/12/2007, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agree, it's very tricky to compare. Do you know of any stories from the readers of the SOS DVD about how they've used it? I think hearing from them is vital to making an accurate comparison.

On Dec 16, 2007 3:10 PM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Some of these are en.wikipedia specific, but... The license sucks. There hasn't been a valid full history dump in months. Live feeds are hard to get and are probably too expensive. It's too likely there are copyright violations, libel, and other illegal content in Wikipedia, and redistributors would have a harder time asserting DMCA and/or Section 230 protection (if they can at all). Live mirroring is forbidden. Those are my main reasons.

On 12/16/07, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <picking one of the minuses> On the plus side of this coin is we get a much *broader* range of subjects from which we can accept volunteers interested in them. I'll pick an example from several decades past, just so I don't step on any currently hot topic issues, and there is less of a danger of discussion being diverted from the larger issue. Some decades past it would have been very difficult for serious encyclopedias to get highly qualified academics to write on womens studies subjects, simply because there were none. So what they did was write about the general subject, such as womens movement and the different varieties of feminism, but wouldn't have had any way of writing about the broader issues, without severely lowering the bar for *formal* qualifications they required of their contributors. Since the barrier for entry is lower on wikipedia, we are unlikely to have lacunae on subjects that are only now pushing through to becoming subjects of serious study in academia. This is a continuing *first mover* advantage we have on encyclopaedic coverage of such subjects. I won't point out which subjects they currently are on wikipedia, as I don't think it would serve anything other than useless fingerpointing and arguments about inclusion. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

Thomas Dalton wrote: Writers can only hope that their books will be read. Writers write because they have something to say. They have no way of knowing ahead of time whether a writing will be popular. If they let themselves be distracted by egotistical consideration the writing will suffer; they might as well be writing Harlequin Romances. I see no basis whatsoever for your notion that popularity is the whole point of our existence. Where is your evidence for that sweeping statement? This doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia has become tremendously popular, but let's not confuse ends and means. Ec