Dear Wikinews Volunteers;
I am writing this e-mail to ask for a contact email address or a phone
number for Wikinews as a news publisher. I am also writing this e-mail to
ask for general consent for the articles on the Wikinews to be used on a
mobile application for the purpose of English language education.
I am currently in the process of developing a mobile application for
English Language education. The application presents users with sentences
from a Wikinews article and asks the users to fill in the blanked-out
words. A link to the full article will be shown on the same page, as shown
in the screenshot provided as an attachment to this e-mail. These news
articles will be retrieved from the official Wikimedia dump files provided
at: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/, hence minimal strain on the Wikinews site
will be expected. I hope the use of the Wikinews articles in the
application will help English language learners learn more efficiently
whilst increasing the exposure and traffic to the articles from Wikinews.
Though no concrete decisions have been made at this stage, it is likely for
the application to be monetized through means of advertisement and premium
features. I also would like to stress that there will be no monetization
conducted by the means of restricting access to certain Wikinews articles.
All users will be able to freely access quizzes generated from any of the
Wikinews articles as we firmly believe that it is only ethical for us to
profit from values that we have provided in addition, and not from the sole
products of volunteers who have contributed for free. There will also be no
use of the Wikinews logo or information that may give users a false sense
of endorsement of the app by the Wikinews community.
The application is currently in the stage of being reviewed before being
published for an open test in the Google Play Store. However, for it to be
published under a News category, it must provide valid contact information
of the news publisher with at least an e-mail address or a phone number. I
shall think an e-mail address of a Wikinews administrator will be
sufficient for this role.
To summarize, I am asking for informal general consent of the community for
the Wikinews articles to be used in this project, and a contact e-mail
address for Wikinews as a news publisher.
I greatly respect the work done within Wikinews and hope that this project
will have a contributing impact on the Wikinews community. If you have any
queries or issues regarding the project or would like to have an access to
the prototype of the application please contact me at pimts98(a)gmail.com. I
would also be grateful to talk to people who are just interested.
Yours faithfully,
Genesis 11 Project Team