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@gmail.com. I would also be grateful to talk to people who are just interested.
Yours faithfully,
Genesis 11 Project Team