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

[Theo10011]

With all due respect, this sounds almost delusional. The fact is, it is the
restrictive control being exercised at Wikinews to fulfill some internal
quality standards that is choking the idea behind the project.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, pi zero <wn.pi.zero at gmail.com> wrote:

> Having only a few hours ago been alerted to the existence of this thread,
> I'm afraid I'm rather overwhelmed by it.  Way too long to read.  I've
> glimpsed a number of false/misleading statements about en.wn in passing,
> but
> would probably spent all night properly locating them all, let alone
> attempting to answer them.  (Hm, there was something about Wikinews being a
> bureaucracy, and of course the post that started this thread...)  I'm also
> rather puzzled by the nature of this thread, which seems to be largely
> non-Wikinewsies discussing what they think about how the inner workings
> ought to be changed of a sister project whose *current* inner workings are
> probably more unfamiliar to ---for a non-random example--- Wikipedians than
> those of any other sister.  (I've spent three years studying it and am
> hopefully just about up to speed now.)
>
> However, in a general collegial spirit toward Wikimedians having a
> discussion (whyever they're doing that), I'll offer a few general remarks
> about en.wn.
>
> en.wn is a wiki at, roughly, the extreme opposite end of several spectra
> from en.wp.  To oversimplify (the only way I'll get anywhere in this),
> en.wn
> is just about as different a wiki from en.wp as it is possible for a wiki
> to
> be.  Note, there is nothing un-wiki about en.wn.  It's very wiki.  What it
> *isn't* is Wikipedian.  Some Wikipedians, I think, are actually kind of
> afraid of en.wn, because all wmf wikis are drive by idealism, and part of
> the idealism of Wikipedia is a belief in various rules of wiki dynamics
> that
> aren't the way en.wn works.  Volunteers driven by idealism naturally have a
> massive emotional investment in those ideals ---that's what makes idealism
> great for sister projects!--- and in this case it means these Wikipedians
> have a massive emotional investment in disbelieving in the way en.wn works.
>

If that spectra is based on the level of activity and openness than I might
agree, it is on the opposite end of en.wp. So according to you, we
wikipedians are afraid of en.wn, that's a rather scientific argument. You
lose me after that, something about idealism and emotional investment.


>
> The thing is, Wikinews confronts boldly, every day for several years now,
> challenges of quality control that Wikipedia is glacially slowly being
> forced to sidle up to if it is to thrive on into the future.  These are
> *really difficult challenges*, and I'm kind of amazed by how well we're
> dealing with this stuff that Wikipedia isn't ready for yet.  Obviously
> Wikipedia will never be Wikinews, but... Wikinews is the vanguard, and
> Wikipedia will eventually benefit from things we're figuring out (very,
> very
> slowly, but that's hardly surprising).
>

Yes, its a big problem the "glacially" slow quality control on English
Wikipedia. The facts however tend to disagree with you supposition. It's
larger and more well written than ever before. But it is good you can
congratulate yourself already, Wikinews being the Vanguard and all. It's
good that you think Wikipedia can survive in the shadow of Wikinews and find
benefits from it.


>
> A note on a slightly different tack.  A comment I made in a private
> discussion a few days ago (among experienced Wikinewsies, about the inner
> workings of the project) ran something like this:
> > I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
> university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as
> homework.
> Besides the somewhat incidental fact I'm proud of the project, there are
> two
> points of interest here.
>

Yes, lets congratulate Wikinews again.


>
> First, we do have a class of, I think, about thirty university journalism
> students currently submitting articles for review.  Yes, that can produce a
> glut on the review queue, which we're learning how to keep up with and not
> allow it to keep us from reviewing the best articles in reasonable time.
>  Of
> course we *also* want to spend a significant amount of time reviewing the
> *worse* articles, because how can those authors improve without feedback?
> Tricky.  This also means an especially high number of failing article
> reviews.  Some of these students honestly don't get at first the concept of
> neutrality, or perhaps how to not plagiarize, or some other basic
> principle.  Last semester we were surprised by how many final-year
> journalism students had trouble with this stuff, and we didn't let up our
> standards for them, and from what we hear, the professor was *delighted*.
> That's apparently just what he wanted, and he's sent another class this
> semester to get some hard knocks from us.
>

Is this your metric of success? Some university decided to send 30 students
to work online on a news based open project?  Well, at least they learnt to
plagiarize.


>
> The second thing about this, I only figured out myself when I realized
> reviewing these student's work reminded me forcefully of my time as a
> teaching assistant.  That, plus the recent nomination of the Old English
> Wikipedia for closure.  Wmf is about education, and an argument in that
> nomination was that the purpose of a Wikipedia is to educate readers by
> providing them with information in their native language.  Well, I saw two
> fails in that: first, reading it is surely educational *about Old English*,
> and second, *contributing* to it is surely massively educational about Old
> English.  The idea that contributing is educational applies in spades to
> en.wn, obviously, or why would a professor be telling his students to go do
> it?
>
> Anyway, there are a few thoughts.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>