[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 19:59, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of
> the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a
> major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within
> minutes of the event.  That article and many corrections went on line
> immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.
>

Not to toot my own horn, but in the run up to the UK tuition fees
debate in Parliament, I wrote a longish synthesis article for English
Wikinews on the topic which tried to basically give a synthesis of all
the important parts of the debate at the time:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_Parliament_to_vote_on_tuition_fee_rise_on_Thursday

It eventually became a featured article.

To do news effectively, we need to be able to handle breaking news as
it breaks, produce detailed synthesis articles and have them approved
before major events (so people can be informed citizens about those
events), and provide useful original reporting.

I'm not convinced that English Wikinews is fundamentally broken
though: if we can find a way of breaking the review bottleneck, it
becomes simply a matter of throwing more people at the problem.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>