IRC office hours for the strategy plan will be held as usual.... next
office hours will be: 04:00-05:00 UTC, Wednesday 23 September
Local timezones can be checked at http://tiny.cc/kReRZ
It's a big week - the launch of the call for participation will happen
today.
Our office hours are in #wikimedia-strategy.
You can access the chat by going to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and
filling in a username and the channel name (#wikimedia-strategy). You
may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Facilitator, Strategic Planning
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
> From: Casey Brown <lists(a)caseybrown.org>
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 8:56 AM, <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> > (Aside: Who are the wikinews-l listmods?)
> You can reach them by wikinews-l-owner [at] lists.wikimedia.org. It
> looks like it's just Chiacomo now, it would probably be good to have
> 1-2 more people (I'm sure it's not much work, but more people is
> always better).
I'd be happy to work listmod here, I assume the most significant part of
the work is zapping spam that has been held for review - with the odd
message asking to unsubscribe to the list instead of doing it online.
Brian.
> Do not open the attachment to the previous email. It contains an operational trojan horse.
Well, I'd say that's fair grounds for a listmod to ban that email
address.
(Aside: Who are the wikinews-l listmods?)
Brian.
IRC office hours for the strategy project are upon us again.... Our
next office hours will be: 20:00-21:00 UTC, Tuesday 15 September.
Local timezones can be checked at http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=9&day=15&year=20…
Office hours are on IRC (#wikimedia-strategy at freenode)
You can access the chat by going to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and
filling in a username and the channel name (#wikimedia-strategy). You
may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
Another option is http://chat.wikizine.org.
For those that haven't been around En.WN today, we hit 20 published articles
in one day (September 12 - UTC)!! This is a fairly major deal for us since
we haven't hit anywhere near this number of published articles in one day in
a long time. In fact I claimed it as a new record high since I didn't
remember the last time we had that many. As it turns out, we've had a few
days better than that, but none of them since we instituted the {{peer
review}} system. So, I think we should still claim it as a record.
For all those that were on today writing/reviewing or just chatting &
helping out - I want to say a big thanks to you all. Especially the last 2
hours when many rear ends were kicked in to over drive to make it to that
nice shiny "20" number.
For my second item of business. I got interested in our article counts
after all the arguing of when the most articles was, so on and so forth, so
I went and did some data grinding. I pulled out the number of articles in
every "Day Category" (EX: [[Category:September 12, 2009]]) and then worked
some Excel magic on them. I posted a bit of interesting data along with
some very pretty pictures (Excel graphs) which I've published for everyone
enjoyment: [[User:ShakataGaNai/Statistics Project]] ( http://enwn.net/5967).
Some highlights:
* We average 8.7 articles per day.
* Since the beginning, we've only had 6 days with 0 articles (Though 4 of
the 6 have been in the last 12 months)
* Most articles ever published was 27, on April 6, 2005
* If you look closely at the "Articles Per Day" graph you can see a
noticeable slow down in article publishing since the introduction of {{peer
review}} (Quality over quantity?)
Enjoy
--
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]]
http://snowulf.com/ - Blog
http://snowulf.imagekind.com/ - Pictures
This has been a test of the emergency sig system.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Samuel J Klein <sj(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:46 PM
Subject: open IRC meeting w/ Wikimedia Trustees: this Friday, 1800 UTC
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikipedia list
<wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Hello,
We wanted to have a more informal forum for discussing Wikimedia
issues with Board members, so the three new Wikimedia Trustees (Arne,
Matt, and myself) are hosting an open meeting on IRC in #wikimedia
this Friday.
Where : #wikimedia
When : Friday September 11, 1800-1900 UTC
(11:00-12:00 PST / 14:00-15:00EST / 20:00-21:00CEST)
Other Board members will hopefully be there as well; we picked a time
when we knew all of the new members could attend. Please join with
any thoughts or questions you have for the Board or about Wikimedia in
general. If you'd like to see something on the agenda, whether or not
you can attend in person, please add it here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_meetings#September_open_meeti…
Since we only have an hour, we will try to keep to the agenda. New
topics brought up after noon UTC the day of the meeting will be
addressed on-wiki if we run out of time.
I'm looking for someone to help moderate the chat. If interested,
please reply offlist. Thanks!
SJ
Reminder: Strategic Planning office hours will happen at:
04:00-05:00 UTC, Wednesday, Sept 9.
That is:
Tuesday, 9-10pm PDT
Wednesday, 12am-1am EDT
We'll meet in the channel #wikimedia-strategy on IRC. More details
are available at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Office_Hours
We will provide some overview into the next phase of the strategic
planning process, as well as some ideas on how to have a local
discussion about strategic planning.
Join us!
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Facilitator, Strategic Planning
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
All,
I've been kicking around some thoughts for a while, and I felt it was time
to share and see if I can get some feedback on and maybe some traction for
change.
== Long Version ==
We all want new contributors, after all, there is like 20 of us that are
really active at any given time. Hell, I could probably give the names of
everyone that is reasonably active on Wikinews off the top of my head. We
all know when someone goes missing, because something drops, either article
output falls a few articles a day or audio wikinews ceases to exist all
together, or the review queue backups. Wikinews biggest problem is burn out,
we _all_ have to contribute a significant amount of time or the project dies
(See also: Holidays).
So how do we get new contributors?
KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Our "defining guide" is [[WN:SG]]. Who here
can honestly say they've read every single line? I'm sure a few can, but I
know I haven't. It is 20 printed pages. The only "easier" guide on getting
started that I know of is [[Wikinews:Writing an article]] and that is 6
pages, that is still too length in my book. We should have a goal that a
new user (who understands Wiki-syntax) can come in, read the basics and get
started writing in less than X time. What is X time? I'd say 15 minutes,
tops.
Second part, user interest in the topic. I'm interested in many things, but
I'm not that much of a news writer that I think I can scratch out 3 decent
paragraphs on it, which is our minimum. This leads to me to my next
point...
While I love what goes on with Wikinews, sometimes I get the feeling that
we're too rigid. As mentioned previously our Style Guide is lengthy, and
not only is it the guide - it is basically our rules for publishing. Part
of that is that we must have 3 paragraphs. While I think that is great
because it forces us to push up the quality of articles... but we set the
bar very high for new contributors. You can come into Wikipedia and create
a new article with one sentence and it might have a chance of staying around
and becoming worth while. Wikinews, it won't, period. I think we might
want consider alternatives to the "regular article" and what standards we
should have for those. Hopefully these can lower the barrier to entry, and
give us some flexibility into helping people get their stories published
rather than the flat "too short, stale, delete it" mind set.
For example: Shorts, local & photo journalism. All 3 of these types of news
we accept in some form now, but maybe not as easily as should. For example
shorts have to be combined into a days worth of shorts (with at least 2 or 3
stories). Local news is the same as any other news. Photo Journalism?
Well I haven't seen too much of it, and that which I've personally
submitted, I've had to beg and bribe (ok, mostly bribing) to get it
published without 3 paragraphs of accompanying text.
We could consider adding something like "Shorts: " to the beginning of a
short story, and allowing it to go as a one paragraph story. We could even
have a "Shorts" category that would exclude it from being published in the
"Latest News" section on the Main Page we have now. Maybe it can have it's
own little section on the front page. Local could follow the same theory,
allow it to be shorter in order to entice users to come and write a little
bit about their on goings of their home town. If they write something
large/long/good enough we'll even remove the "hide from 'latest news' flag"
(What ever that would be) and that would push it up out of the dark depths.
That entices people to not only come and start (because it is easier to
write one paragraph) but it also entices them to write more/better as they
get more accustomed to our way of doing things because they want their
article to get more promotion.
Photo Journalism. Basically if the user is submitting a majority of
pictures (say more than 5-6 pictures of an Event), the requirements for
writing anything more than clear and concise caption should be tossed out
the window. How many people go to events and take a bunch of pictures that
could be turned into an interesting "Photo Essay" (or what ever you want to
call it) that turn away from Wikinews because they don't want to write
paragraphs and paragraphs? I know that I personally have opt'd to not
"cover" something because I didn't think I could manage to write 3
paragraphs on what ever it was. Hey, I'm a photog, not a writer. That even
was on my Accreditation Request, it's not like it was a secret.
Something that is underlying to all of this that I haven't mentioned
previously: We need to make Wikinews _single writer friendly_ NOW. It has
long since been established that unless something major is going on, you are
probably going to be the only one writing an article. If we start to pull
in people covering local events, this is going to be doubly so. So we need
to do everything in our power to make the process friendly for one person to
go through. I honestly don't have any suggestion on what that should be,
other than to keep that in mind.
Lastly, I'd like to propose the addition of one optional step to our
publishing process. A {{Copy Edit}} or similarly named template that
basically states "Hey, I've finished this article, but I'd appreciate it if
someone would copy edit this article before placing it into review". Again,
personal experience, I'm not a very good writer, I know my work needs to be
copy edited. Why not make it easier for the copy editors out there to seek
out what they should work on. I've got two people who I've managed to drag
in on occasion to do copy editing because they are good at it. I've only
done it for my work, or what I happen to see as being egregiously bad.
== Short Version ==
* Make short versions of our key "getting started" documents (WN:SG,
Wikinews:Writing an article, etc)
* Allow single story Shorts (Won't be published under "Latest News")
* Allow short local news (Similar to Shorts)
* Allow Photo Journalism stories w/o text (other than captions)
* Make WN writing process "Single User" friendly
* Add optional {{Copy Edit}} step to publishing process.
Sorry all that this was so long, but I've been mulling over these issues for
a while. I'm CC'ing scoop in hopes of getting more people to reply to this
mail.
--
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]]
http://snowulf.com/ - Blog
http://snowulf.imagekind.com/ - Pictures
This has been a test of the emergency sig system.