[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

Andrew Lih andrew.lih at gmail.com
Wed Sep 14 18:02:08 UTC 2011


On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature 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 -- 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 eventualism are at
odds with each other.

The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
latter.

-Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)



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