[Foundation-l] Simple Wikinews WAS: Please REJECT the latin wikinews project.inmediatly

[Ray Saintonge]

Brian McNeil wrote:
> I would like to make a modest proposal, although I am doing so here prior to
> on-wiki. Why not have a Simple: namespace on the regular English Wikinews? I
> don't see a separate project gathering enough momentum to sustain itself,
> but I do see such being an excellent sub-project that helps Wikinews'
> readership by 'breaking in' non-native speakers. It can easily have its own
> Main Page with a link from the default main page, say "News for English
> students" and a list showing the last handful of articles.
>
> The separate namespace also allows for Simple stories to be derived from
> existing Wikinews stories and use the same title. This would be of most use
> when there are major events that attract dozens and dozens of contributors,
> eg. The London Tube bombings.
>
> >From that idea, you have to realistically start looking at where your
> contributor base is going to be drawn from. Will people from simple.wp be
> interested in doing news articles? Can the Wikipedia Academies be expanded
> to suggest working on Wikinews? - Simple or otherwise. Can we tap into the
> senior citizen population and get them writing the news so their
> grandchildren can read it?
>
>   

Your proposal is very good.

Strangely though, I don't think that grandparents will generally be the 
best source for this kind of writing.  Language education has gone well 
beyond this, and most grandparents may be too far removed from knowing 
how children learn.  Writing a good 'simple' article may be more 
difficult than writing a good article with all the available tools that 
the language provides for us.

Ec