On Mon, 2013-10-21 at 10:28 +1100, David Blackall wrote:
> Thanks Brian, good idea/s. I am a baby boomer so am not much good on
> technical stuff but to make the wikinews front look and work like a
> prestigious newspaper, more interactive with page turning, might be the
> go (The Economist, New York Times, The Guardian).
I've put a preliminary site up at http://edu.wikinewsie.org
However, I've not touched a fraction of the options available in the
theme I've put on there. All I've focused on for the moment is security
and responsiveness.
> Create the sense or emotion that wikinews is as good (which it is by
> the rigour applied to reviewing) simply by a thematic look and an
> interactive flow. I am now hammering the Glen Greenwald story with my
> students, he is one of the many bloggers who have made good and then he
> gets employed by The Guardian, which says it all about how blogging can
> be as rigorous as journalism, blogging in most cases is journalism, as
> is especially the case for wikinews.
I'd disagree with that; it's more the case that 5% (or less) of blogs
are actually journalism. With the entry-barrier to publishing being
all-but-eliminated, there is a very long tail of 'blogs of dubious
provenance'. Don't mistake the mainstream adopting the format for
blogging as a form of journalism being widespread.
I've still a fair bit of trial-and-error to getting edu.wikinewsie.org
set up as I'd like. I may-well ditch the current theme (Customizr);
there are, after all, over 2,000 to choose from[1]. Those can be further
enhanced with plugins[2], which is where students who want to use a
blogging platform are going to need to acquire some technical skills.
[1] http://wordpress.org/themes/
[2] http://wordpress.org/plugins/
It should be possible, once I've a few more quirks and kinks ironed out,
to offer individual blogs to students. Beyond that, my gut feel is we'd
need to have mechanisms to import articles from Wikinews to blogs in
near-realtime. Beyond that, I don't know; plus, it's late here.
Brian McNeil.
--
Wikinewsie.org | https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
"Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."
GPG Key Fingerprint: 7C3D FFD5 5ED5 B80F 1D18 A52B E84C 8928 6ABC A7AD
I'm looking for a new WordPress theme to use on wikinewsie.org. Although
the theme used on the site ticks most of the boxes in-terms of the look
for the site, it is now unmaintained and hasn't been touched for a few
years.
There's two main criteria I'm looking for in any theme (apart from being
free). Those are that: (a) it supports floating/variable width. (b) It
supports a highly-customisable left sidebar.
I've the basics of edu.wikinewsie.org installed into a local virtual
machine at the moment. The point of this is to enable me to properly
tweak security, configuration, look-n-feel, and so prior to making it
public.
It is a 'multisite' install, so will happily support
foo.edu.wikinewsie.org. That will allow any educational institute using
Wikinews in the classroom to blog about their experiences. Or - perhaps
of more-import with the push for more of a focus on original reporting -
the issuing of email addresses to students.
We know that firstname.lastname(a)wikinewsie.org increases responses from
people we'd like to question for Original Reporting. By the same logic,
the likes of firstname.lastname(a)foo.edu.wikinewsie.org (albeit long)
should help students try their hand at getting people to give them input
for original reports.
Similarly, one of the issues spotted with one round of UoW students was
mixing up editorialising with reporting. Having a WordPress instance for
each educational institution working with Wikinews would allow them to
do that.
Multilingual comes under 'nice to have' for any suggested WordPress
themes; but, please let me know of any you're aware of that fit the
above criteria.
Brian McNeil.
--
Wikinewsie.org | https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
"Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."
GPG Key Fingerprint: 7C3D FFD5 5ED5 B80F 1D18 A52B E84C 8928 6ABC A7AD
Laura is signed up as a speaker for this, and I've just paid the
registration fee to attend.
As an easy introduction, looking at photoessays has been suggested. That
has far more re-use potential. What we do need is to know of any events
in the Cardiff area where it would be worthwhile going with cameras and
so on.
Brian McNeil.
--
Wikinewsie.org | https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
"Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."
GPG Key Fingerprint: 7C3D FFD5 5ED5 B80F 1D18 A52B E84C 8928 6ABC A7AD
A copy of the most recent edition of The Wikinewsie Group newsletter can be
found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikinewsie_Group/Newsletter/4.
This month's edition includes information on:
* our progress with aff-comm application.
* research being conducted by the group.
* education outreach being worked on.
* planned original reporting at the Sochi Paralympic Games.
* technical updates to e-mail, servers, translation tools, etc.
* information for reporters on oppprtunities to report at the United
Nations and get more recognition for their work.
* technical issues in regards to conducting outreach.
* a list of original reporting completed in the past month-
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
--
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com