[Foundation-l] Chinese Wikinews: board action required

[Jimmy Wales]

Given the struggles that some Wikinews projects have had already, I feel 
that we should be very conservative about
creating new versions.  As Erik says, this is a board decision, and by 
convention on such matters, I vote with Angela
and Anthere anyway if they disagree with me.

So, unless Angela and Anthere tell me to vote otherwise, I would vote to 
not create Chinese Wikinews at this time, and
not until we have greater consensus in that community to do it.

--Jimbo



Erik Moeller wrote:

> There has now been a vote, organized by Formulax, among Chinese 
> language Wikimedians on whether there should be a Chinese Wikinews.
>
> The results are at:
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E6%8A%95%E7%A5%A8/%E7%BB%B4%E5%9F%BA%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB 
>
>
> In an amusing demonstration of the problems of voting, there were 13 
> votes opposed to the project, 13 votes in support, and 1 vote with 
> support only if compromises could be made about NPOV.
>
> There was a larger vote earlier on whether this should be up to the 
> global community to decide, or to the Chinese community. That vote was 
> inconclusive, too, with opinions evenly split (50% want it to be a 
> global decision, 50% want it to be a local decision) and very strong 
> expressions of emotions on both sides.
>
> We can continue voting until we get a nice result, but I think it 
> would be best now for the board to make a decision about this.
>
> My recommendation is a compromise: the project should go ahead under 
> somewhat more rigid conditions (at least 10 support votes with at 
> least 6 of them from Wikimedia regulars PLUS the process at 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch ). We can deal 
> with problems of censorship as they arise.
>
> Erik
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