Dear Mr Douglas Gardner;

Thank you for your swift response and for letting me know that the most of the articles are licensed under the Creative Commons License.

I understand that Wikinews is a relatively decentralized organization, which makes defining an e-mail address for a representative a difficult task.

However, the Google's Play Store policy, require me to include a contact to the news publisher on the application.

I presume this is mainly for the purpose of giving people a way to handle fake news, stolen contents, et cetera.

This is why I thought an e-mail address of an administrator would be sufficient, but I also think any e-mail address of a Wikinews contributor who are kind enough to respond to this kind of inquiries would also be fine.

Do you recommend that I contact the administrators directory via contact information listed at the administrators page: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Administrators ?

Thank you for your support.

Yours sincerely,

Genesis 11 Project Team

On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 3:49 AM Douglas Gardner <douglas@chippy.ch> wrote:

Hi there,

The text of English Wikinews is, for the most part, available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence.
That means you do not need explicit permission from anyone in order to use the content, as long as the terms of the licence are met. This includes commercial reuse.

For more information see https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use and https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.

The latest database dump of enwikinews was on 2 December 2022. If you need news as it happens, you may find use of the Wikimedia API more suited for your use: see https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/Documentation/Getting_started and https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/

This mailing list is fairly low-traffic and you may not get a response from a Wikinews administrator willing to act as a contact for you. Wikinews administrators don't have additional editorial authority over other users: they simply happen to be granted access to a few special technical rights, like deleting pages and being able to block users.

Yours faithfully,
Douglas Gardner

[[User:Microchip08]]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2022, at 6:26 PM, tomoyuki jinno wrote:
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
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Douglas Gardner
Glasgow

Voicemail: 0141 8151751

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