Erik Moeller wrote:
- 2-3 Wikimedia (not Wikipedia) regulars in that language supporting it
- certain key documents being created / translated on Meta (mission
statement, Wikinews-NPOV, FAQ, Main Page etc.)
I am not sure that 2-3 people is enough.
I'm not sure what you mean with "demonstrated that the existing Wikipedia community supports it". Would you like local polls for each language? I'd personally not want to use that approach, because I'm worried about it leading to a loss of coherence within the Wikimedia community over time, just because of some localized statistical fluctuations in such polls.
I'm not sure I follow. I think there's a much greater risk of loss of coherence if we let 2-3 people make the decision rather than if we track a broader consensus of the community with a localized poll.
Regardless of what approach we use, it will always be difficult to predict the success of a new language edition before it is set up. It really depends on the passion and dedication of the handful of people who start working on it. A single highly motivated volunteer can run a very successful Wikinews edition all by himself.
I think this last bit is what is not true. Wikinews differs from Wikipedia in that news is constantly changing, whereas encyclopedia articles are timeless. If a single highly motivated volunteer writes 100 articles at a rate of 2 per day, then even if no one else joins, those articles have permanent lasting value whenever more people do come along. With an encyclopedia, laying down a base of work is always valuable, if anyone helps or not.
With news, though, stories are stale after just a few days.
Therefore, a much higher number of participants than 1 is needed for a successful wikinews. If only 2-3 people are involved, it is likely to falter after a few weeks.
Look at fr.wikinews.org for a demonstration of this. At the moment, the top headline is for 15 Feb -- and it is now 3 Mar.
be deterred. That's why I think a policy based on people doing work on Meta first, rather than on some poll or vote, might lead to better results.
This is a very good idea, yes.
The problem with just saying "We'll be Beta for two years" is that it's a very top-down approach.
No, I didn't mean that exactly. It is my prediction that we will want to be in beta for at least that long. I do think that some set of criteria makes a lot of sense of course.
A lot of people have complained to me about Wikinews being in Beta and them not knowing what to do about it and who decides that and why.
I think this can be clarified, and I think that the bar should be set quite high *and* people should know that this is our method of deflecting certain types of criticism, not a negative thing.
Google News is still in beta.
The idea is: if someone wants to write an article saying Wikinews is not yet very good, we want to be able to respond: of course, we are not claiming that it's a released product yet.
This would also necessarily mean that, for example, the English Wikinews might move out of Beta before the Bulgarian one, which I think is the right thing to do.
Yep.
--Jimbo