[Foundation-l] 10,000 articles on the English Wikinews

[Casey Brown]

Congratulations to all those who continue to make Wikinews such a great news
source! :-)

On 9/5/07, Ilya Haykinson <haykinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> All,
>
> I'd like to congratulate the entire Wikinews community for passing
> another threshold as today the English edition of Wikinews created our
> 10,000th article.  While the total article count is not nearly as
> important to a news site which depends on the flow of articles more
> than the total volume of content, this is still a significant symbolic
> figure and one that we are very proud of.
>
> With about 10 articles published per day on average, about 17,000
> users, almost 20 average edits per article, and somewhat under three
> years under our belt, we've managed to build a wealth of news content
> available to the world under a free license.  We focus on synthesizing
> free-content versions of news that is reported elsewhere, as well as
> using our community to create original reporting not available
> anywhere else.
>
> Throughout the years we've remained somewhat different from a lot of
> other similar projects.  Within the Wikimedia family we are the only
> project that depends on continued story flow rather than just being
> able to be built up over time.  We are also the only site with an
> explicit goal and mandate to publish original reporting and research,
> yet still staying subject to the NPOV and other core Wikimedia values.
> We also try to connect ourselves with the outside world: we allow
> trusted members to become "accredited reporters", we invite
> collaboration with sites that want to mirror or use our content, and
> even invite folks to call in on our telephone hotline.
>
> Outside of Wikimedia, we are one of the larger citizen journalism
> websites in terms of visits and users.  Unlike most sites, we do not
> allow editorial content and stick to newswire-style reporting; unlike
> almost all sites, all content is licensed for unrestricted use subject
> only to attribution.  Unlike almost all other citizen journalism
> sites, we do not allow ownership or authorship of articles: they are
> owned by the wiki, and no single person is on the by-line of our
> articles.  All said, these modes of operation are unique within the
> citizen journalism space and create both opportunities and challenges
> as we continue to grow.
>
> Wikinews still has a lot to learn and a lot to do.  We are still
> struggling to grow our story flow; we are not as widely read or
> respected as we think we should be; we have trouble with using
> MediaWiki at times since the platform wasn't really developed for a
> news site.  We have challenges in integrating into the larger
> framework of citizen journalism, in part since we do not allow the
> opinionated, POV content that drives a good subset of other citizen
> news efforts.  We are still not getting the level of crossover from
> Wikipedia that we probably should be getting.
>
> Yet we are very hopeful and enthusiastic about our future.  We are
> getting some technical changes in place to make our site a lot more
> lively, interactive, and useful.  We are looking forward to Single
> User Login helping increase Wikipedia-to-Wikinews crossover.  We are
> reaching out to other sites that share our mission and are trying to
> establish collaborative efforts to help us grow and help Wikimedia
> fulfill its mission.
>
> So please join me in congratulating the Wikinews community, and indeed
> the entire Wikimedia community, for helping us reach this milestone.
> It may seem symbolic, but for us Wikinewsies it is definitely worth a
> celebration.
>
> -ilya haykinson
>
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>



-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023

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