[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[me at marcusbuck.org]

English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional  
competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create  
reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good  
encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news  
were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage  
for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.

A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if  
you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.  
On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there  
are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if  
you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.

And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts  
will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article  
and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if  
you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your  
text. If not today then in a year.

Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an  
increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.  
If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the  
project will never lift off.


It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by  
paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that  
the project always stays above the critical mass.

Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English  
language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language  
news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I  
guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and  
hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the  
diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer  
reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and  
original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per  
village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places  
and propagate sharing.

Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native  
content before.

That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I  
think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At  
least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a  
difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much  
else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead  
to anything making a difference.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox