Have you tried emailing Terinjokes? (I think i have his email
somewhere if you need it).
-bawolff
On Nov 16, 2007 3:23 AM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
I'm not totally sure which are the most active
Wikinews communities, offhand
I believe the Polish Wikinews does quite well.
Where I oppose Adambro's stance is I think we should try and focus on
getting at least one or two contributors from non-English sites to do a
little work on en. and build a degree of trust. This becomes a point of
contact for finding out details like how many regular contributors, and the
provision of a summary of any candidate who wants accreditation.
Assuming Milos' accreditation request goes through we'll end up likely
setting up scoop-sr(a)wikinewsie.org, I won't be able to read that so in this
instance it is perhaps better to add non-accredited addresses to the
forwarding so we're not looking at a single person being the contact for a
language edition.
As a related issue... With Terinjokes gone I have no easy way to update the
accredited reporters on
http://www.wikinewsie.org. The details are in an SQL
database, I managed to remove Ed Brown via the management console, but I
really need a form with the db password prompted for to add/edit entries.
I'm the only one with a profile up and that is bad.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message-----
From: wikinews-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikinews-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Milos Rancic
Sent: 16 November 2007 11:07
To: Wikinews mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Wikinews internationalization
I want to make two related points before responses to the particular ideas.
The first one is related to the size of the projects. Wikinews
communities will be much larger in the future. If everything goes
straight forward, it is reasonable to suppose that Wikinews community
will be larger then Wikipedian in the next 10 or 20 years. Simply,
while work on encyclopedia will require more and more specific
knowledge and skills, work as journalist will require more or less the
same knowledge and the same skills. However, community which is 10% of
Wikipedian community size is very large.
The only body which is able to coordinate work on Wikipedias is WMF
and this is a Wikipedian problem. WMF's target is not content, but
housekeeping. There is no way how to impose to different projects even
some basic principles like NPOV is.
Because of that cooperation on Wikinews wide level is not only a
matter of small communities, but it is a matter of thinking about the
future. Wikinews community has to be able to say that some language
project is not going in the right way as well as it has to be able to
make some changes to the particular project. This means that, for
example, there should be one policy for administrators, one policy for
dealing with problematic users, one policy for giving and revoking
accreditations, one organization (so, yes, one "Wikinews Foundation",
not separate organizations in different countries, but
chapters/offices strongly connected between themselves).
In relation with that I want to say that Adambro's comment at the
section for my candidacy for accreditation [1] has a lot of sense:
"[...] I appreciate that you have contributions in English which could
be helpful in forming an opinion of you but not all users who come
here from other languages seeking accreditation will have this and so
I must continue to oppose on the basis that I don't think the English
community should, or is really in a position to, assess these users to
an appropriate level."
It is not only a matter of en.wn community, but a matter of general
Wikinews community. How can I know that one Thai contributor is a
valid one when I don't know a word of Thai? Or would another Serbian
contributor would get accreditation only because they are bureaucrat
on sr.wn and I said that they should get it (I really have only good
words for both of other contributors)?
But, if not, it would mean that the whole Serbia would be left with
only one accreditation for a long time; or that Thai Wikinews wouldn't
have any accredited reporter for a long time. This, also, means that,
for example, Italian Wikinewsians will try to make their own
organization, which would be the beginning of the situation which we
have on Wikipedia: factionized community at the lines of the language
borders.
So, we need to find some solution. And here are some of my (new and
old) ideas for doing so:
- We should start to write Wikinews-wide policies. Of course, such
policies should be reasonable and they should leave a space for
projects autonomies in the future. They should lead a community from
its beginnings to the time when it is enough mature to function
autonomously.
- What is necessary for one contributor to become a recognized one?
Writing on English Wikinews or English Wikipedia? It may be one of the
solutions, but as far as I am able to see, there are some good machine
translation engines, like es-en is. Maybe we should recognize such
languages and give the opportunity to the people who are contributing
in those languages? It is not perfect, but it is one part of the
solution.
- There are also other things which may prove someone's work, the most
notable are related to previous Wikimedian work. And we should write
somewhere those particular solutions.
On 11/15/07, bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Perhaps we should also start some page on meta to
coordinate
inter-language stuff (in the past though such things have died
quickly)
We should try again :)
Maybe have each wiki write sort of reports
(translated by google
translater?) every so often (~once every couple of months, but just
short little things, couple paragraphs at most. nothing like
Eloquence's state of the wiki.) describinbg what local events that
have happened, what successes the wiki has had of recent, what
pitfalls/mistakes they have made, just general thoughts of general
wikilife so we're all on the same page.
Yes. It may be a good idea. May we say that we would do that quarterly
and the first one at the and of January?
On Nov 14, 2007 5:23 AM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
I agree, each language Wikinews is a relatively
small community. We need
to
work cross-wiki on things like weather, oil
prices, and other standard
automated news website stuff. Bots that do things like create new day
category pages should be moved over to the toolserver and set up to cover
all language variants and appropriate interwiki links.
Hm. In the next couple of days I'll start a page on Meta about this
issue. For the beginning, we need to see which bots (and other
programs) are working and with what purpose.
Craig Spurrier is currently drawing up plans to
propose a Wikinews
Foundation (name not decided). This will be purposed with the task of
standing behind the reporters, verifying credentials, and so on. If that
comes to fruition, I'll likely hand over the
wikinewsie.org domain to the
org.
I saw this at foundation-l a month or two ago and I was wandering what
is going on with that. It is good to hear that it is going on well.
[1] -
http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Wikinews%3AAccreditation_requests&…
iff=522591&oldid=522490
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- Brian
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