[Foundation-l] Umberto Eco's interview

[Cristian Consonni]

Hi,

I'm the coordinator of Wiki at Home in Wikimedia Italia.
With this project we have already managed to interview a few
notable[1] people. The questions are written collaboratively, opening
a page on the italian Wikinews[2]. Then Wikimedia Italia takes contact
with the potential interviewee and finds the reporter (usually a WMI
member).

I have also the recordings of an interview with Jimbo ... I have done
it maaaany months ago, but I really can't find the time to transcribe
it.

I am really sorry about that and, in my opinion, this is a major
problem with volunteer-driven interviews. Usually there are a lot of
questions to ask and even if the interviewer make some (arbitrary)
selection in my experience this results in long (> 1 h) interviews.
We are used to report integrally what the interviewees have said
(besides some style corrections to make the text readable), unlike
newspapers we don't have problems of space and we think the best thing
to do is to report things exactly as they have been said.
So the main effort is the transcription and the editing of the
interviews and for 1h/2h interviews this can take weeks.

I really don't know if there is a solution for this.

Cristian
CristianCantoro
Wikimedia Italia

[1] i.e. people having an article about them on (at least the Italian
version of) Wikipedia.
[2] for Mr. Eco, the page was this
http://it.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinotizie:Storie_in_preparazione/Intervista_a_Umberto_Eco