[Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[Ilya Haykinson]

In my opinion (as a one-time active Wikinews Bureaucrat, I helped drive
forward many of the early site policies, though not including the new review
regime), I think Wikinews problems run far deeper than the burden of
reviews.

At issue is the purpose of the project. Our early goals were to have a) a
wiki structure that delivers b) an NPOV article base that is c) available
under an open-content license allowing reuse. Of these three, I think we'd
done pretty well by b) and c). We hadn't however, managed to attract a
_growing_ user base to make a) really functional.

Unlike all other Wikimedia projects, Wikinews cannot succeed via
slow-but-steady improvement. We can't add one article a day and over time
build a site with 10,000 relevant articles: we'd still end up with a site
that has only one relevant article and a ton of maybe-historically-useful
archives. Thus, we would require a lot of people contributing and reviewing
things in order to achieve constantly high throughput and retain relevance.

Unfortunately, Wikinews always had a problem with attracting a huge user
base. We had to rely on a few hundred semi-active contributors, and maybe
only a few dozen very committed people. We also would have a bunch of people
who misunderstood the purpose of Wikinews and would post stories about their
dogs, or biased rants, or things that were impossible to confirm given no
sources ("accident on corner of 4th and broadway, 3 people hurt"). So our
response was to focus on quality and process, rather than purely quantity.
This meant that if a user showed up with a drive-by article creation --
dumping an article onto a page that was clearly not in the right shape to be
published -- we would wait for someone to improve it. If nobody did, it got
deleted or marked as abandoned.

Imagine a Wikipedia in which every article makes it onto the homepage,
immediately or within hours after creation. Either you have to have a lot of
people to improve every article to some reasonable standards, or you need to
have a process that requires high quality from the start but has a
side-effect that restricts quantity. The latter is the direction in which
Wikinews has headed over the last several years, and I think that's why we
have always had (and continue having) people who're unable to publish
legitimate stories: the process is just not optimized for this.

My recommendation has been, for several years, to close Wikinews as an
independent entity and add a "News" tab to Wikipedia. Just like Talk and
main namespaces have different standards, the News namespace would follow
Wikinews-like guidelines for what's acceptable. Articles would be closely
tied to summary encyclopedic articles. It would be easy to create news
summary pages. The (comparatively) huge number of Wikipedia editors would
largely prevent low-quality articles from remaining in prominent positions.
We could, thus, enable easy open editing capabilities. I continue strongly
standing by this recommendation. I don't know whose call it would be to make
this happen.

I don't mean to discount the great successes of Wikinews to date. Nobody
believed that it was possible to have a high-quality, community-contributed,
_and_ generally-NPOV news source, and I think that we showed that it was
possible. We managed to add original reporting to the site, and create a
process that monitors for certain kinds of editorializing or NPOV abuse --
we're rare in the Wikimedia community for effectively allowing and
encouraging original reporting. We've also managed to have several scoops
over the years.

However, I still believe that the experiment is largely not a successful
one, since readership and editorship is too low to be relevant in the news
marketplace. In my suggestion (and probably many others that also advocate
radical change in leveraging Wikipedia) we could preserve lots of the great
things that came out of the experiment. This takes some initiative, and
again I'm not sure if we even know whose initiative it would take.

-ilya haykinson

On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, Andre Engels wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru<javascript:;>
> >wrote:
>
> > Can not you just introduce a flag of a "trusted editor", similar to an
> > autoreviewer? I mean, if the news creator is a en.wp administrator most
> > probably he/she is not a vandal trying to post junk in the Google News.
> Why
> > this message should have been reviewed at all?
> >
>
> I'd go even further - Wikinews was born from the wiki movement, wasn't it?
> Having extensive, multi-tier checks before something is accepted is
> decidedly unwiki. The wiki way is to assume that not just hardened
> wikimedians but also most though not all newbies are well-intending. The
> wiki way is to say 'yes' quickly, but with the revert button easily
> reachable.
>
> --
> André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com <javascript:;>
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-- 

-ilya