[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Andrew Lih]

Hi all, reading this thread with much interest. Lots of ideas on this,
in bullet points:

- As a journalism professor, I've followed (and debated) Wikinews
since its very start. I say this not to claim authority, but simply to
say it has been something I've pondered continually for six years now.
See this interview I did with Harvard Nieman Lab for my thoughts, both
text and visual on why I thought Wikinews had problems:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collaborative-journalism-project/

- I remember having exchanges with Erik and others during Wikinews's
inception -- I didn't think wikis were well suited for producing news
(wire and breaking news) and predicted a long term problem. However, I
did support Wikinews in spirit and even took up arms as a Wikinewsie.
I received press credentials as a Wikinews reporter in 2005 to cover
the WTO conference in Hong Kong and saw potential in the spot
photography mission of Wikinews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikinews_creds-_Press_Pass_to_2005_WTO.jpg

- Where Wikinews has been successful and clearly valuable is in what
those in journalism call "feature" content. Interviews with political
leaders, photography of events, and investigative pieces. These
verifiable forms of reporting are not time critical and don't demand
"full coverage" like breaking news beats. The Wikinews interview with
Shimon Peres is a good example:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel

This got me to thinking about Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature that
says, "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."

The corollary to this is: "At some point, news stops being news. A
Wikipedia article never stops being an article." This is where the
tension lies, and why Wikinews is not a clean mapping over of
Wikipedia principles.

Wikis depend on eventualism: given an infinite timeline, pages
eventually get better. News cannot survive on that. The "decay" of the
value of breaking news and the long timeline for eventualism are at
odds with each other.

- Pointing at WMF's lack of support seems misplaced. Wikipedia took
off and had its viral growth well before WMF had a board or a budget
for more than simply paying for servers and bandwidth. Few, if any,
community projects in the Wikimedia universe depend on explicit WMF
support for their fundamental survival.

- But all is not lost. Here is where I think Wikinews can rise from
the ashes, and be a powerful project. I was inspired by Achal
Prabhala's "Oral Citations" project he presented at Wikimania 2011.
The basic gist: in Wikipedia, how do you reference knowledge that
isn't on the web or even written down yet? This is where our "first
world" standards of [citation needed] and strict referencing clash
with nascent Wikipedia editions (like in India and Africa) which don't
have nearly as many online sources as in English and European
languages. Achal's idea: make Oral Citations a project where you can
record folk and non-written knowledge and make your own material that
can be referenced in Wikipedia articles. His example was documenting a
children's game in India that is widely played, widely known, but not
written-down and referenceable in a way that would satisfy Wikipedia's
standards. See the "People are Knowledge" video here:
http://vimeo.com/26469276

Immediately, I saw how Wikinews could step up to this challenge. Oral
Citations is fundamentally an act of journalism (even if Achal and his
team never use the term). Wikinews could be doing what National
Geographic does, by creating multimedia-rich feature stories that
document corners of the world not yet covered by market-driven
journalism. In essence, if People are Knowledge, create referenceable
works and stories from those people.

And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
to have stalled lately. And I have to imagine how interesting this is
to GLAM cooperation that is now so prominent in the community. Putting
my educational hat on, I could see this project being something
journalism schools around the world could feed into, and be a powerful
global project that brings together many different storytellers to
help feed a feature journalism mission of Wikinews. It could be
something that museums and the cultural sector around the world
participate in. It's the next logical evolution of Wikipedia's
principles.

WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."

Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.

Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.