Jan,

You are BCC'd on this response as it is "for the records" on the Wikinews mailing list. I, personally, have taken an enormous amount of flak recently, been forced to surrender positions of authority on-project, and feel there is an element of campaigning to drive me off-project for my more acerbic style. At 41, I doubt that will change.

Off-wiki I have discussed with one or two old-timers a change or two to our policies. This was prompted by what went on with your contributions, and their reasoning in ceasing to actively contribute to the project.

Effectively, after sending this email, I am going to be BOLD (A sort-of policy on-project) and change the directions and rules around material that is deemed stale. If it is original reporting, I feel it should be moved to a user's personal space on-wiki instead of deleted. In a nutshell, you should never lose that work and be free to build upon it in the future.

Should you have anything further to add, please consider if you wish to divulge this email address to a public mailing list. If you are happy with that, then please use a reply to all option.

One off-wiki comment was that, given your genuine credentials, and with the help of one or two sv volunteers, there is a small chance you could help kickstart sv.wikinews.org. You're obviously smart enough to follow the remainder of this email and see where this would be a career-enhancing opportunity for you.

I would be happy to continue our discussion regarding evidence (audio, and video), but in a public space. I know full-well that to get your UN-recognised credentials you are required to be making the majority of your income from journalistic activities; I faced a similar roadblock (to official recognition) when I was still resident in Belgium. Not everyone on WMF projects is an utter freetard who would take away your livelihood. If some way to share 'evidence' privately can be set up, I think you could be an extremely valuable contributor.

You, provided people stopped bickering, and did real work, would then be able to capitalise on Wikiewsies' writing skills to bring your photographic work wider prominence.

A closing comment, more for the peanut gallery, is that I queried a local university about mature student entrance requirements for their journalism course. The response did indeed indicate that, as well as surpassing the bar for entrance by almost double the required points, my contributions on-wiki would be taken into consideration and could, potentially, see me bypass a year of the full course towards a degree. As an old socialist, I would prefer to see Margaret Thatcher, and her "pay for your education" policies safely in their grave first. Ideally, buried face-down to ensure they dig the wrong way if reanimated.

Brian.

On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 20:44 +0200, Janwikifoto wrote:

Hello Brian and all,

First just another comment, I see that the story "Sweden's Crown Princess marries commoner" is on the first page, and if you look at the photos you will find they are taken by Janwikifoto and Prolineuser. Me and another guy. With official media accreditation, along with the big press agencies. So Wikimedia is now in some way considered 'world class'. Maybe it would be interesting for somebody to a story about Wikimedia being officially accredited?

Going back to the emails and the potential story,

...

...

How much do you change what they have really said ?

That is a give-and take-judgement decision.

Ok

...

...

Personally, I think a comprehensible english is

You really didn't get the "extracted" quote from Orwell in the style guide, did you?

I have read and agree on the six points. I have not read the full text by Orwell, will take too much time. Commenting on the six points, I have never seen "bete-noire" before, I did understand it from the surrounding text, but it is not something I would expect a common englishman to understand :-)

...

The link to Orwell's full article in Spectrum is an ideal example.

Got to do that later. Now end-of-month is near, I have to get some text done and send out an invoice, in order to live. Academic studies comes later.

...

And, yes, Wikinews needs more articles. That does not mean dropping from a very high standard of English.

Ok, what do we do with this Frank la Rue material then? If I was the sole judge I would shorten what they said, in that process clean up spoken word to written word, and try to extract the meaning. Cut maybe 30-40% of the text as some is lengthy discussions. However, I could not achieve a very hight standard of english, just a decent standard, and it would mean changing exactly what they said to what I interpret them as having said. That is what I would do if I was the sole judge.

So what way forward do you suggest? That somebody re-writes the text from what it is like now (the emailed version)? Or that I try again to bring it into some kind of shape?

...

I know a few people have upset you by requesting the video footage

No, not upset, it is simply that they do not think before they ask. They consider it so natural to upload everything. What I have is 23 minutes of speech, and I simply do not want to send out what I have taken time to record, for free, without getting paid, so somebody else is writing another story out that, and getting paid (what I mean is that somebody will pick up the sound and write a story and sell to say Guardian and get paid). I do not mind free info sharing, but now I am broke, and I am definetly not going to send out all the stuff that took so much time. I can write something for free, sometime, for Wikinews, if it does not take too much time. This has taken a lot of time, I have written all this as a 'first-time' experience in the hope that problems can be fixed for the future.

...

'clear-speaking' extract of the associated audio

What is an 'extract'? The sound is the important stuff, the video gives relatively little information.

Extracting certain parts takes again time. Exactly what will/can be achieved by sound extract? What I wrote in the emailed text version is pretty close to what was said. What is the proposal for edit? Again, I look forward to suggestions on what to do, what way to go.

I wrote another short story on German foreign minister talks on Gaza, that story is really not very interesting, BUT it is original reporting, and there are reasonably good photos. Will anyone fix that up for presentation?

I see problems in the future. I can supply a few original stories, that have not been published extensively elsewhere, but I can not write an excellent english, and I do not see anyone that can and really will edit the english sufficiently, and I do not see that it will happen quickly before the story dies of old age. Swedish Wikinews is dead, I think last article is dated 2009. Should I just forget Wikinews totally? And just do a few Wiki photo uploads and nothing else?

Best Regards from Jan