I'm not about to re-subscribe to the waste of time that is foundation-l,
just to comment that Ilya's remarks are by-and-large correct.
Wikinews is not as successful as it should be due to the 800lb gorilla
that is Wikipedia. That's no reason to kill it off - especially
considering that many of those I'm informed are participating in this
little discussion have me, personally, at the top of their "hit lists".
[If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out Tony1.]
Put your own house in order first, gentlemen.
Wikipedia *still* does not enforce their "not a news site" policy, and
it is an utter waste of time bringing such up; numerous selfish
Wikipedians reject efforts to direct news-writing efforts to Wikinews. I
neither know, nor care, if this is because they're incapable of writing
to the high quality standards Wikinews sets; or, because they prefer
their egos being stroked by Wikipedia's high page-hit counts on articles
where they wrote a dozen or less words.
Trying to roll Wikinews back into Wikipedia would be a disaster. There
are, as said, too many people who've been sitting, patiently, sharpening
knives in preparation to kill "the red-headed stepchild of the WMF".
And, Wikipedia could never ever handle original reporting.
That Wikinews is, currently, being used for a second semester of course
assignments from an Australian university is - to me - a clear
indication that what we do is valid, and valuable.
Brian McNeil.
--
Email: brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org
WikiMedia UK, interim Scottish coordinator/GLAM-MGS liaison.
Wikinews Accredited Reporter | "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to
be news."
On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 15:54 -0700, Ilya Haykinson wrote:
In my opinion (as a one-time active Wikinews
Bureaucrat, I helped
drive forward many of the early site policies, though not including
the new review regime), I think Wikinews problems run far deeper than
the burden of reviews.
At issue is the purpose of the project. Our early goals were to have
a) a wiki structure that delivers b) an NPOV article base that is c)
available under an open-content license allowing reuse. Of these
three, I think we'd done pretty well by b) and c). We hadn't however,
managed to attract a _growing_ user base to make a) really
functional.
Unlike all other Wikimedia projects, Wikinews cannot succeed via
slow-but-steady improvement. We can't add one article a day and over
time build a site with 10,000 relevant articles: we'd still end up
with a site that has only one relevant article and a ton of
maybe-historically-useful archives. Thus, we would require a lot of
people contributing and reviewing things in order to achieve
constantly high throughput and retain relevance.
Unfortunately, Wikinews always had a problem with attracting a huge
user base. We had to rely on a few hundred semi-active contributors,
and maybe only a few dozen very committed people. We also would have a
bunch of people who misunderstood the purpose of Wikinews and would
post stories about their dogs, or biased rants, or things that were
impossible to confirm given no sources ("accident on corner of 4th and
broadway, 3 people hurt"). So our response was to focus on quality and
process, rather than purely quantity. This meant that if a user showed
up with a drive-by article creation -- dumping an article onto a page
that was clearly not in the right shape to be published -- we would
wait for someone to improve it. If nobody did, it got deleted or
marked as abandoned.
Imagine a Wikipedia in which every article makes it onto the homepage,
immediately or within hours after creation. Either you have to have a
lot of people to improve every article to some reasonable standards,
or you need to have a process that requires high quality from the
start but has a side-effect that restricts quantity. The latter is the
direction in which Wikinews has headed over the last several years,
and I think that's why we have always had (and continue having) people
who're unable to publish legitimate stories: the process is just not
optimized for this.
My recommendation has been, for several years, to close Wikinews as an
independent entity and add a "News" tab to Wikipedia. Just like Talk
and main namespaces have different standards, the News namespace would
follow Wikinews-like guidelines for what's acceptable. Articles would
be closely tied to summary encyclopedic articles. It would be easy to
create news summary pages. The (comparatively) huge number of
Wikipedia editors would largely prevent low-quality articles from
remaining in prominent positions. We could, thus, enable easy open
editing capabilities. I continue strongly standing by this
recommendation. I don't know whose call it would be to make this
happen.
I don't mean to discount the great successes of Wikinews to date.
Nobody believed that it was possible to have a high-quality,
community-contributed, _and_ generally-NPOV news source, and I think
that we showed that it was possible. We managed to add original
reporting to the site, and create a process that monitors for certain
kinds of editorializing or NPOV abuse -- we're rare in the Wikimedia
community for effectively allowing and encouraging original reporting.
We've also managed to have several scoops over the years.
However, I still believe that the experiment is largely not a
successful one, since readership and editorship is too low to be
relevant in the news marketplace. In my suggestion (and probably many
others that also advocate radical change in leveraging Wikipedia) we
could preserve lots of the great things that came out of the
experiment. This takes some initiative, and again I'm not sure if we
even know whose initiative it would take.
-ilya haykinson
On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, Andre Engels wrote:
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
<putevod(a)mccme.ru>wrote;wrote:
Can not you just introduce a flag of a
"trusted editor",
similar to an
autoreviewer? I mean, if the news creator is a
en.wp
administrator most
probably he/she is not a vandal trying to post
junk in the
Google News. Why
this message should have been reviewed at all?
I'd go even further - Wikinews was born from the wiki
movement, wasn't it?
Having extensive, multi-tier checks before something is
accepted is
decidedly unwiki. The wiki way is to assume that not just
hardened
wikimedians but also most though not all newbies are
well-intending. The
wiki way is to say 'yes' quickly, but with the revert button
easily
reachable.
--
André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
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