I ran a quick experiment like this few years ago, where people could upload audio reports to my external scripts, and my system would stitch them together into one file for streaming/downloading. I still think the idea is worth trying, though the technical and policy changes aren't to be discounted. Some examples of policy issues are:

- who is allowed to upload files? - how does one deal with bias in the audio report? do new versions replace old versions of reports? - how do we prevent abuse of the system? - who are the consumers of the output of such a system, and what would they want to get out of it? this will guide the format of the audio snippets that people upload.

I think all of these are definitely possible to answer, and develop. However, they would be much harder if the work happens outside of Wikinews. I recommend that we build the system as an extension on top of MediaWiki that will take [[Media:MyAudioHeadline.ogg]] files and sequence them into a single file, at query time. So for example, there may be a page to "stitch together" a day's newscast. The page includes something like:

<audio> Media:Introduction-2008-06-01.ogg Media:PersonShootsDog.ogg Media:BarackObamaWinsPrimary.ogg Media:InterviewWithFamousWikiUser.ogg </audio>

Then the page, if retrieved with a query string like, say, ?fmt=ogg, will return these ogg files sequenced into one file.

The reason I recommend this approach is that it retains all the on-wiki tools for abuse management; allows for replacement of files (just upload a new version of the audio report with the same filename -- or use a different filename and resequence the content of the <audio> tag). The management of streams is still text-based, allowing people to easily resequence the current stream. They're archivable, since we can just have different pages with these tags per day. And the tag is based on <gallery> which people already kind of know how to use.

Thoughts? Anyone interested in making this happen?

-ilya

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:

Mirko is suggesting we have a segment of headlines somewhere on the newsroom. See below email.

Thoughts?

Brian McNeil

-----Original Message----- From: Mirko Lindner [mailto:mirko@creativecommons.se] Sent: 04 June 2008 11:42 To: Brian.McNeil@Wikinewsie.org Subject: Wikinews and JustFM

Hi again,

I did some thinking...well that sounds to great a message ;) I had an idea, how about creating a "tool" that allows people to upload one headline at a time, so the same way the wikinews usually work. Okay that's not quite clear yet...

Let's say someone writes a Headline in the Newsroom (if that is actually the place) and he could also record just this one headline and store it somewhere either in the newsroom or somewhere else. The radio would then pick the last 5 or 6 headlines recorded and build adhoc news. We would have to come up with a mechanism of keeping more important stuff longer in the loop of course, but I figured it would bring down the threshold for someone to record a part of the news, as it is 20 seconds rather than several minutes one has to record...

What do you think?

/mirko

PS: I haven't thought about the technical side yet, but I am sure we can find a way to do all this ;)

PPS: As I am preparing for a semi-official announcement of JustFM I wanted to ask if we should include wikinews as part of the radio and explain a bit how the newsroom works or sth. Say that the news lie with the wikimedia and that we would be more than happy about anyone who wants to get involved, please click here to get to the wikinews site ... Well I would work on the text a bit, but as a general idea ;)

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