[Foundation-l] Re: Swedish, Spanish, French Wikinews set up

[Erik Moeller]

Daniel Mayer schrieb:

>And that is a best case scenario. But one of the most cited reasons why
>*Wikipedia* is so great is the fact that it is kept up-to-date. The same type
>of person who is interested in current events is in the same pool of people who
>would likely contribute to Wikinews.
>
Nope. The work of writing a news story from scratch is very different 
from just summarizing what's going on. It is a very specific contributor 
profile which, as the history of the English Wikinews has shown, is hard 
to find among Wikipedians. You are just equating the groups because it 
suits your argument without any empirical evidence to back it up. Let's 
look at who actually edits the Current Events on en. This is a unique 
list of contributors from the second half of October 2004, before 
Wikinews was active:

Admbws
Ahoerstemeier
Alan Liefting
Ambi
Ancheta Wis
Andrejj
Anonymous Cow
AntonioMartin
Arwel Parry
Avaragado
Bob rulz
Bogdangiusca
Bontenbal
CanisRufus
Chrism
ChrisO
Ctrl build
Danny
Davidcannon
David Gerard
David Newton
Dejitarob
Dobrien
Ed Cormany
Ed Poor
Eean
Eewing
Elf
Enceladus
Evercat
Evil saltine
Frazzydee
Fred Bauder
Gadfium
Get-back-world-respect
Golbez
Grunt
Harris7
Hooverbag
Infrogmation
Irishpunktom
Irismeister
JB82
JBradHicks
Jewbacca
Jiang
Johnleemk
Jongarrettuk
Joseph Dwayne
Jxg
Kaihsu
Ke4roh
Korath
Laguna72
Lance6Wins
MacGyverMagic
MarkPNeyer
Mateo SA
MathKnight
Matt Crypto
Mixcoatl
Modemac
Montrealais
Mrwojo
Nadavspi
Nickshanks
Nknight
Peter L
PFHLai
Poccil
Radagast
Rdsmith4
Remember
Richard Cane
RickK
Rje
Rmhermen
Saint-Paddy
Sbwoodside
Scooter
Scott Sanchez
Securiger
Seth Ilys
Simonides
Solitude
Spammer132
Spencer195
Sverdrup
The Anome
The King Of Gondor
Tillwe
TimothyPilgrim
Tirin
Toby Bartels
VeryVerily
Violetriga
Wernher
Whkoh
Ydorb
Youssefsan

This is a list of English Wikinews editors who have actually created 
articles, as far back as Special:Newpages allows:

Amgine
Andrew pmk
Arwel Parry
BesigedB
Borofkin
Boud
Cafzal
Carlosar
Dan100
Dcabrilo
Dysprosia
Gadfium
Jiang
King Ho Cheung
Ronline
Snooo
Squeakfox
Submarine
The bellman
VikOlliver
VlSimpson

Now, even though we're searching in a very large set, of these people, 
only 3 have actually edited Current Events on the English Wikipedia:

Arwel Parry
Gadfium
Jiang

Of these three, only Jiang has made a substantial number of edits on 
Wikinews. and he still contributes to Current Events as well. Arwel made 
11 edits on Wikinews, Gadfium made 9 edits. None of the really active 
Wikinewsies, to my knowledge, are involved in Current Events on WP.

Try writing a Wikinews article. Doing the research, collecting the 
references, writing a whole piece from scratch. This work is much more 
tedious than just providing a one paragraph summary with a source. It 
takes a different kind of person to do that. And the empirical data 
shows that.

>You cited a Wikipedia regular as the author of this article. That's great but
>the time it took to write and research that single story could have been spent
>updating perhaps a half dozen existing Wikipedia articles.
>
Perhaps. People have a right to choose what they spend their time on. 
It's not up to you to decide that they shouldn't write news stories 
instead of updating Wikipedia articles. We don't have a hierarchy of 
projects. Wikinews has equal rights to Wikipedia.

>And you are not in a position to go against the will of any wiki user
>community. 
>  
>
That is your opinion. In my opinion, it is the will of the Wikimedia 
community as a whole which counts. Wikimedia is a global project. It's 
not up to the French Wikimedia community to decide by majority that they 
don't want Wikinews, unless they have France-specific reasons for not 
wanting it. And I am supported in this both by policy and by statements 
of the Board to this effect, when I asked them this very question two 
months ago. Yes, I asked the Board whether we should treat the French 
Wikinews differently from the others because of the way the vote went, 
and the answer was no - I can document this with IRC chatlogs if 
necessary. This, by the way, is an interesting test case for language 
autonomy. And I firmly support the principle that Wikimedia-wide 
decisions can overrule local ones.

>You have already managed to piss a great many people on the French Wikipedia
>off.
>
People who didn't like Wikinews won't like the French Wikinews edition 
or any other. That doesn't matter. The time for voting on Wikinews is 
over. The project is launched and it will be started in the editions 
where there is sufficient interest to do so. Now, the real problem, I 
think, was in setting up the Wikinews voting pages as subpages of the 
languages. That gave some people the impression that the vote count of 
the Wikinews/Vote/Fr page has relevance on its own. It doesn't. Global 
votes should be counted and aggregated as such in the future.

Regards,

Erik