[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24,  <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
> 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.

That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news
source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned
that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I
said, heresy, For his ears :P

The main difference between Wikipedia (projects with similar dynamics)
and Wikinews is necessity for maintenance. And that's -- huh.

Serbian Wikinews is driving on deal with the news agency Beta and bot
which I wrote. But, for ~10 days it doesn't have content added by bot
because formatting of Beta pages changed. I have to: (1) remember on
which server I run that bot; maybe password, as well; (2) analyze four
years old code; (3) change it; (4) but, most importantly, I have to
have free time for that. And willingness.

Now, imagine news source without that bot and with necessity to have
news between ultra important events. Five persons would be needed to
cover 24/7, not counting editor. But, let's say that we just need
those 5 persons and that editors would be people from the community.
~40 stewards, volunteers, are able to cover most important issues
24/7, mostly. And stewards are volunteers of the system which works.

Wikinews is not working and up to ~10 days ago the only useful
Wikinews -- as general source of information -- was Serbian Wikinews
and just thanks to the deal with a news agency and one bot. I tried to
do the same with English Wikinews, but, maintaining harvester from a
couple of sources is a job which uses a lot of time, on daily basis.
(Still, if anyone with Python knowledge is willing to share workload
with me to cover English [and other] Wikinews editions, I am still
willing to activate bots.)