[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 18:19, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>
>>
>> Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be
>> accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were
>> replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the
>> problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
>>
>
> Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or
> even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when
> I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on
> all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT
> MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was
> doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid,
> uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments
> about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things
> if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very
> frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one.

I probably worded it wrongly, but, I think that you didn't get my
point anyway. One thing is to do boring job, the same thing is to have
responsibility for taken job, even it's about voluntarism; completely
other thing is to do that on time for prolonged period of time. If
it's not about really really motivating task (I mean, you could find
such volunteers if it's about sex), it's hard to organize <whichever
number> of volunteers to do something in particular time frame.

The problem is the next:
* There is a need to have news every day and to keep eye on important
events 24/7.
* Note that it's not about regular stewards' night shift, when we have
bots and users who warn us about irregularities and that the most
complex irregular tasks require 10-15 minutes of doing simple things,
like clicking on right links is.
* Take as many volunteers as you want and give them the task to care about it.
* Try to cover 24/7.

It is likely that you'll need ~5 persons per small amount of time
(let's say, one hour per day) + some people to replace the core
editors for weekends or so -- to be sure that everything is covered
and that volunteers are still motivated as they don't have too harsh
tasks. That's around 100-200 highly involved persons, which is around
the top Wikipedias -- as 100 edits/month is not enough for being
"highly involved": 10 edits per workday makes more than 200 edits
requirement and I don't think that any of Wikipedia editors think that
their productive Wikipedian day was when they made 10 edits. Now, just
imagine how many edits have to be made during *one* day to create a
decent news story. And note that you'll have to *organize* them,
actually, unlike in the Wikipedia case.

In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor
pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only
other option is to hire someone to do that job.