Most of the enforced editorial standards on en.Wikinews are about quality control and NPoV, so they aren’t strictly speaking necessary. Without them article quality will decrease, but both article quantity and creation-to-publication time will likely improve. Whether or not en.Wikinews’ editorial standards are good or not depends entirely on what your priorities for the project are. If you prioritize article quality (I do), then the current peer review system is an acceptable (though imperfect) way of achieving that. If you prioritize having lots of articles, then doing away with those standards is a way to achieve that goal. Because there is a difference of opinion on which of these paths to follow, I don’t disapprove of the fork, though I do see some problems in the road ahead.
My main concern about the fork is lack of copyright standards. About a year ago news organizations started suing *individual bloggers* for copyright infringement. Even individual bloggers that have low readerships. They won’t hesitate to sue a wiki, even if it only gets a few thousand hits a day.
Now it’s unlikely (though not impossible:P) that they’ll sue over a single infringement, but if they notice a pattern of copyright infringement they’ll go ballistic on you.
So my recommendation is that you keep one small part of the peer review process – the copyright section – just to stave off the inevitable lawsuits from the MSM. Newspapers and their online counterparts feel under threat, so it is of the upmost importance to any news wiki right now to make sure they aren’t drawing the attention of the MSM’s attack dogs.
gopher65
From: pi zero Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 6:11 AM To: Wikinews mailing list Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] We've been forked! [fwd from foundation-l]
You're asking why they created a fork? It's simple enough. Enforcing editorial standards, as en.wn does, inevitably creates resentment. Some of these folks will have gone for the fork because they want to try to create a news site without that resentment (an admirable if naive goal; in my opinion, they haven't fully realized what it's going to mean for editorial standards, not to mention copyright liability). Some of them will have gone for the fork because they, personally, resent English Wikinews, and are eager for an opportunity to strike a blow against it (not such an admirable motive, though very human). And some will have gone for the fork out of a mixture of those two.
There are complications ---cultural conflict between en.wn and en.wp is notable, personal feud--- but that's the bottom line.
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Michael Moroni michael.moroni@mailoo.org wrote:
HI you all, I'm an user from Italian Wikinews. Could someone explain why do some people fork Wikinews in order to create another project? - Airon90
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