[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Phil Nash]

Sue Gardner wrote:
> On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
>>> What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
>>
>> Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website
>> rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
>> original research and never really had very much of it. It is also
>> operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the
>> field pretty much to itself when it started.
>
> Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is
> because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to
> look like.

Practical experience on a day-to-day basis would suggest that this is unduly 
optimistic. We are failing to attract new editors who can be, or wish to be, 
educated into "what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like", and 
are discarding those experienced editors who do. Even those who remain but 
are becoming increasingly disillusioned with all the nonsense that goes on 
will eventually leave, or create a fork of Wikipedia, and to be honest, if I 
had the money right now, I'd do it myself, and cast ArbCom in its present 
form into the bottomless pit.

I used to care about Wikipedia, as did others, but it's becoming 
increasingly difficult to do so.