As I've mentioned on the Water Cooler page, I think that a responsible news organization needs to provide some sort of a response to such a huge worldwide disaster. You will notice that there are plenty of organizaitons that make exceptions for this event: Google has a link, most news sites list relief agencies, and Wikipedia itself has a prominent link on the homepage.

I agree that long-term this type of content needs a different home. Much like the 9/11 wiki, it will need to get archived eventually. But for now, we can easily live with it. The Tsunami Help pages also serve another purpose: they introduce lots of people to Wikinews. These people might eventually become readers or even contributors on other topics.

The right approach needs to be to corral the content created by the Tsunami Help bloggers into its own area separate from the rest of Wikinews (already done), to not permit any copyvio (removed when we catch it), to place proper warnings about the content (done where it matters), and to then start making it less POV (in progress, thanks to Davodd and others).

So in summary -- I believe that the pages are valuable, that it is correct for a wiki-based news organization to allow that kind of work in times of severe crisis (especially on a temporary basis), and that the benefits of the Tsunami Help pages both to society and Wikinews outweigh the negative problems of the fact that it doesn't fit into our current policy dialogues.

-ilya

On Sun, 2 Jan 2005 02:17:42 +1000, Craig Franklin craig@halo-17.net wrote:

Scríobh David Speakman:

...

This group: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Tsunami_Help

Seems to be hijacking wikinews. I posted a concern in the watercooler on this topic. Also I have nominated a few of their non-English posts for deletion.

I've noticed this too, and posted in the water cooler. Basically, I feel that their intentions are honourable, but Wikinews is not the place for such things, unless of course they've gotten permission from higher-up. There are also a few established Wikicontributors in there, like IlyaHaykinson - I don't know if they've just jumped in because they feel it's a good idea, or what.

Basically though, I agree, they're actions are "hijacking", and their project would probably be better served elsewhere.

Regards,

• Craig

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Craig Franklin PO Box 764 Ashgrove, Q, 4060 Australia http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art, and Culture.

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