[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

"running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never
heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF
(in relation to content projects, of course).

The problem is, of course, that it's hard to move out from the
Wikipedia-centric perspective; and that move will be needed soon for
Wikipedia itself.

Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs
also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has
given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for
writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those
things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care
about things when no one else is able to care.

> 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."

Nothing is perfect. That person shouldn't be the only one who does
that. Such person should be just someone on which the project could
default if nobody else is able to do that.

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

Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and
one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass
around it.