[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:35 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

>
> Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost a
> source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on on
> various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem redeemable
> to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope.
> Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the
> concept justice.
>
> If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and
> particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper
> project over time.

That's basically the idea... until Wikinews is strong enough in one
particular area that it becomes worthwhile to readers (because they
get stories they are likely to care about that don't show up on the
rest of the news sites out there), it can't reach critical mass. (Sue
explains the problem concisely in her post.) The area Wikimedians have
the largest pool of common expertise in and access to is the internet
and online culture. Covering emerging memes and the 4chan and
Anonymous shenanigans and cool and terrible things happening all over
the internet... that's an area where there's still not a great go-to
source for, at least that has anything like an NPOV approach. Wikinews
could have been (and maybe could be still) "local news for people from
the internet". But I think the project has been too limited by trying
to be like a traditional news organization to take that kind of
reporting seriously or encourage it.

The other route to critical mass would be syndication.  Even if volume
started out small, if high-quality pieces occasionally got syndicated
by mainstream news, that could gradually attract more attention and
contribution to Wikinews. That's what the CC-BY license is supposed to
encourage, but it seems that's not enough. A person (or several
people) devoted to outreach / business development who spent a lot of
time reaching out to traditional news orgs to let them know about
specific high-quality pieces that they could syndicate (for free!)
might set the stage for Wikinews (or the new fork) to really succeed.
Maybe that could make a good Wikimedia Fellowship project for an
ambitious Wikinewsie.

(Sorry, I'm a bit late to this thread.)

-Sage