[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews
> requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet
> running. There is nothing artificial in that.
>

That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers
running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community
fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.

I'd argue that deadline-oriented news, being time critical and reliant on
single observers, is inherently a misfit with wiki principles of
eventualism, and the collaborative "magic."

Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be
great to see more moves into that area.

-Andrew