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

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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:

You are comparing en.wikipedia users who edit the [[Current events]] page with
people on en.wikinews. In spite of the fact that that was not my point
(updating of the corresponding articles that are in the news, was) it is also
about two English-language project versions. I already said, very specifically
and a couple times, that Wikinews in English and German are fine due to the
size of the respective language bases. The others I'm less sure about and would
really like to know what those language communities think.

> 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.

I never said it was. My point is that each language community needs to decide
among themselves if they are ready to start a new Wikimedia project in their
language. This is a bottom-up approach, instead of a top down one where a small
group of people decide this for them (or worse, the majority of people who
don't even speak their language force it on them).

> 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. 

They cannot veto the Wikimedia project, but they should be able to prevent one
from starting in their language if they don't feel they are ready yet. The
issue is a bit moot now, since fr.wikinews exists and is not likely to be
closed down. But in the future we need to be more sensitive to the views of
different language communities. This whole ugliness has exposed a weakness in
the current guidelines that needs to be fixed.

-- mav


		
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