[Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] Proposal for the creation of aWikinews foundation

[Delirium]

Brian McNeil wrote:
> The duplication of effort between the two projects is frustrating; news
> should be written on Wikinews and linked to from the "in the news" section.
> Sure, the summaries remain for people who don't want to visit Wikinews - we
> can probably have something coded up that puts a "Return to Wikipedia" link
> up. We do have an unwritten policy on Wikinews of trying to make the site
> "sticky". By that I mean we want visitors to read several articles, browse
> around the site a bit, and perhaps get involved.
>   

I'm not too clear here on what you think Wikipedia is doing that it 
shouldn't be. The current events page itself contains only very short 
summaries, and the only other thing I can think of is a tendency to add 
excessive detail on recent events into Wikipedia articles (sometimes 
called "recentism"), which eventually gets purged once the hubbub dies 
down and calmer hands return to editing the article. If there's some way 
of redirecting that energy to Wikinews, then I'm all for that.

In a lot of cases, though, the news summaries that get written on 
Wikipedia *should* be there, because a summary of a notable event is 
encyclopedic. For example, [[2007 Peru earthquake]] deserves an 
encyclopedia article, and not just because it happened recently---we 
have similar articles on earthquakes from decades and centuries ago.

The "in the news" section is really intended for that---a way of 
highlighting encyclopedia articles that contain information of timely 
relevance (but are still real encyclopedia articles that will still 
exist 25 years from now), not a way of distributing a news feed.

-Mark