[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrea Zanni]

I'm no expert here,
but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises.
I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians,
and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals,
especially because, right now, it relies on them.

Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and
secondary sources,
Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it
collects links about (not so recent) news.
Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place.
As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New
York Times website, which is much more update.

I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last
a single day, but instead
needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill
an informative gap,
because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different
articles on the same subjects,
but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them.
This could be an interesting direction.

Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia:
in case of patent "recentism" (unfortunately, often catastrophic events)
people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial
facts on something that already happened.
If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place
where to write all that stuff.
Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things
have slowed down,
relying on the Wikinews article.

My 2cents, obviously.

Aubrey

2011/9/13 Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org>:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
>> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
>> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
>> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
>> never able to capitalize on this.
>>
>
> When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I
> wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the
> smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi,
> French and Hungarian.
>
> At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish
> Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number
> of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often
> have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can
> access both current news and a historical archive of news with
> verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context
> provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for
> democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media
> available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be
> free-as-in-freedom are good too.
>
> This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less
> availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And,
> yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the
> BBC...)
>
> [1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants
> [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> <http://tommorris.org/>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>