[Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed

WJhonson at aol.com WJhonson at aol.com
Thu Nov 5 18:55:27 UTC 2009


By failing I mean that it never achieved any sort of siginificant presence. 
 When Wikinews was started it was, imho, to shunt news off the main project 
into its own space.  News by it's nature is far more verbose then 
encyclopedic material.  News inundates you constantly, while encyclopedic material is 
more placid and stable.

News should be far more material.  And yet the English Wikinews has only 15 
thousand articles.  So something seriously went wrong in that approach.  It 
simply did not capture the attention of any significant part of the core 
community.

It's a bit silly to talk about three thousand links, when we have over 
three million articles.  So that's one tenth of one percent?  In terms of news 
outlets, our own news outlet gets a trivial number of links compared to 
others.  And it's ours!  That's my point.  That's what I consider failing.  
Crawling along with your tongue out in the desert, while the nearest water is 20 
miles away.

Better to re-focus attention on those projects which are successful, than 
have ten non-successful projects dragging off any resources at all.

Will



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