I want to see the blog resurrected on Wikinewsie - and perhaps others added there too. You can pretty much forget us getting a WMF-provided blog of any particular sort until we prove such will clearly fit the remit laid out to justify 501(c) status.
The Editors' Blog did not do too well for a variety of reasons. The scope was intended to be on the details of the news reporting process, yes with posts being single author and having a clear byline there is nothing wrong with opinion that would not meet NPOV. There is a problem with ranting anger that isn't cogently justified.
A more technical blog, or one with a focus on recent meta-news might work. There certainly isn't much chance of us being able to make submissions to the official WMF tech blog. In this case, WordPress is more appropriate than wiki technology because there is little collaboration on the published item, and a need for a widely-known simple comment system.
I set up Wikinewsie.org because, despite asking again and again, nobody would agree to give us @wikinews.org or even @en.wikinews.org email addresses. The rest is just because it'd be stupid not to have a web page matching the domain in the email addresses.
At Wikimania in Alexandria, there were nods of agreement from Sue, Jay, and Michael when I said I would like the WMF to take over the domain and provide the hosting. Since then nothing, but it is clear from current discussions that Wikinews is not a remotely important project when prioritising the issues the WMF has to deal with. There is an open invitation for stuff on the strategy wiki, and I would quite like to put that up there. However, we have to be able to say what the one-off and continuing costs are.
Realistically, we have to get the Wikinewsie site to a state where we could hand it over without requiring substantial up-front costs, or high ongoing ones. Those costs will fall on the WMF techies. We need to use open source applications that are believed to have been well tested, if not actually had their code audited. Where there is custom code, it should be as short as possible and simple enough to allow a speedy review or audit.
So, the current real pain in the ass with Wikinewsie is maintaining the list of accredited users. It looks like the closed wiki on there with the Public: namespace is the best option for that. Then the number of people who can maintain the data is much bigger, and the task is less technical.
If we change the wiki to the Vector skin and tweak it to look WMF-related, but noticeably enough different, that would be ideal. Then you need a Wordpress theme that matches this. What other glue do we need to hold the whole thing together? What open source tools would we replace Godaddy's email and calendar tools with? A last point is, can we integrate Wordpress, wiki, email, and calendar login a-la SUL? Can we do so with fine-grained enough control to give accredited reporters and admins access to the wiki, but not those who are only admins email? Do we have some sort of Wikinewsie super-bureaucrats who can say, yes, Bawolff gets permissions to go almost anywhere and change technical details, or kick off bug-fix updates. But not post to blog X because he isn't accredited.
Then, is there any specific feature we need from these tools that they don't provide? Can we persuade someone to develop that? I can see a calendar for working on news reporting being very useful if anyone can propose an upcoming event be added, those proposals being vetted, then appearing on a public calendar. That could be far more useful than the current on-wiki mechanism to propose a story.
Are there enough people interested in seeing this happen to work on it on-wiki and do some of the technical work? If so, I'll create a page, lay out what I think we should have, and invite others to do the same and comment on my ideas.
Brian.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Around enWikinews - September '09 From: Tristan Thomas tris@waterhay.co.uk Date: Sat, October 03, 2009 11:22 am To: Wikinews mailing list wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org
This is a good idea, but I was thinking it would be much better if we could have a blog that all accredited users could post to. I know we used to have one that I saw linked from Wikinewsie, but it would be much better if it was on Wikinews itself, similar to the Wikimedia and WIkimedia UK one. This could incorporate technical, visual or news updates from anyone who wanted to do one. Thoughts?
2009/10/3 brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org
In IRC, shen Shaka mentioned doing a newsletter type update I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate this into {{Howdy}} - give it an extra tab for "News" and embed another page or template with stuff like the below bulleted list.
Adding the extra tab is not a problem, but {{Howdy}} is already displaying badly in Firefox on Ubuntu. When I looked at it to see about adding an extra tab it is displayed such that the tabs along the top are wider than the box containing the currently displayed message. I can't see an obvious way within the {{Howdy}} template to, say, increase the template width to 90% of page width.
Brian.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Around enWikinews - September '09 From: bawolff <bawolff+wn@gmail.com bawolff%2Bwn@gmail.com> Date: Fri, October 02, 2009 11:26 pm To: Wikinews mailing list wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org
In the interest of fairness, only one of thoose gadgets are mine. The other one is the original version stolen from the french wikinewsies. Cheers. --
- Brian
Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 6:07 PM, Jon Davis wiki@konsoletek.com wrote:
I've been told at one point in time, we had a regularly scheduled
newsletter
of the important goings on at Wikinews. I can't find it in the list archives, but no matter. I figured it was about time to
start/resurrect
it. After all, we do important things around here and if you aren't on
the
Wiki 24/7, you might miss something. So here are the important
highlights
from last month:
September 12th we had a banner day with 20 published articles in one
day.
[[Category:September 12, 2009]] - http://enwn.net/A029 The RSS feed has been truncated to a more reasonable number - http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikinewsLatestNews We started a page to help Wikipedians better integrated with Wikinews - [[Wikinews:For Wikipedians]] - http://enwn.net/197b [[Wikinews:Make Lead]] has been integrated into Easy Peer Review by
Bawolff
Bawolff also gave us not one but two different gadgets that integrate
to
Wiktionary [[WN:WiktLookup]] - http://enwn.net/F52b As of September 16th, we're not being carried on Google News, due to a change in MediaWiki. Bug #20818 - http://enwn.net/246c Some article statistics were made [[User:ShakataGaNai/Statistics
Project]] -
http://enwn.net/5967 The [[Main Page]] is getting an overhaul, with the new design to show
up in
the next 24-48 hours - http://enwn.net/h Policy proposed & passed to "Expire" Accredited Reports after 2 years.
http://enwn.net/6972 All the Water Coolers are now being archived (by month) automatically. New Administrators: 1, New Editors: 5
Something important get forgotten? Want to help participate in next
months
newsletter? Stop by and leave a note on the respective months entry: [[User:ShakataGaNai/Around_enWikinews]] - http://enwn.net/D132
-- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] http://snowulf.com/ - Blog http://snowulf.imagekind.com/ - Pictures This has been a test of the emergency sig system.
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