[Foundation-l] Chinese Wikinews: board action required

[Yann Forget]

Hi,

Le Saturday 16 April 2005 21:19, Erik Moeller a écrit :
> Jimmy-
>
> > Yes, this is what I had in mind.  The French Wikinews was started
> > according to existing policy, but clearly that policy is inadequate to
> > ensure a proper launch with solid community support.  When we were in
> > Brussels a while back Delphine/notafish was making a valiant effort to
> > get it going/get it organized/make it work, but to my knowledge this
> > hasn't been successful.
>
> it is important to note that Wikinews is currently the *only* project
> that follows a strict language creation policy. There are:
> * 12 Wikinews editions
> * 87 Wikiquote editions
> * 121 Wikibooks editions
> * 173 Wiktionary editions
> * ~200 Wikipedia editions
>
> Suffice it to say that a very large number of these Wikiquote,
> Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikipedia editions are dead or, worse, spam
> magnets. :-(

I advocate blocking projects when there is no real activity until one or 
several volunteer(s) come(s) It would prevent them being squatted by spammers 
like the Slovak Wiktionary recently (21 articles).

This was already proposed some time ago and a page was made on Meta in order 
to have a general overview of the situation. However AFAIK no action was 
taken.

> The elaborate processes for Wikinews as well as the nature of the
> project have certainly put it in the spotlight of community attention.

I think such a process should be used for any new project now.

> But the situation with Wikinews is much better. Of all the editions,
> only one (Bulgarian) is completely dead. It was launched according to
> the old, minimal policy. If nothing happens within the next couple of
> months, or if it starts attracting spam, I'd recommend locking it down.
>
> The French Wikinews is now in a somewhat strange state; it is being
> updated regularly, but not in the way Wikinews should be. Instead of
> writing full-length stories, contributors are writing in "Current
> events" summary style right on the Main Page:
>
> http://fr.wikinews.org/wiki/Accueil
>
> This is unfortunate, as it duplicates the page "Actualités" on the
> French Wikipedia:
>
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actualit%C3%A9s
>
> I hope that over time, the French Wikinews will evolve like the other
> editions into a source of genuine stories. But, at least it is not a
> spam magnet, and there is a small community there.

I hope that a new promotion campaign will attract new contributors for this 
project. This should be started soon as the French Wikipedia is approaching 
the 100,000 articles.

> The Swedish edition has seen no new stories since April 2, but was very
> active until then; I have heard rumors that this is related to a
> conflict on the Swedish Wikipedia.
>
> All in all, I think we are doing quite well. Thanks to a volunteer from
> the Romanian edition, Romihaitza, we now even have daily updates on the
> number of new articles in each language per day:
>
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Statistics
>
> The new "Wikimedia regulars + start writing key pages on Meta" policy
> for new languages seems to work, and I see no reason for any substantial
> changes at the present time. Maybe the number of required regulars could
> be increased slightly.
>
> Given the success of the English one, I hope to start an international
> writing contest soon, which will also help us to track the progress of
> the different languages.
>
> All best,
>
> Erik

Yann
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