[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Tom Morris]

On Wednesday, September 21, 2011, Sage Ross wrote:

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

I'm not sure this analysis is correct. A lot of people now don't get news by
going directly to the site but on social media platforms like Twitter and
Facebook. Of course, for that to work, we need to publish stories quickly.

When stories hit those sites, they have the potential to start rolling very
quickly as people retweet them.

For instance, last night when the Troy Davis execution was going on, the
@en_wikinews feed had damn near live updates from the televised stream from
Democracy Now and other sources. I had a wiki story written up specifically
to try and get it published at the time of execution. It's now still
languishing in the review pile.

Another thing Wikinews could be doing better is original, data-based
journalism. Governments around the world are now publishing more and more
data and releasing it under CC licenses. The British government publish data
under the Open Government License which is basically CC BY. US data is
public domain. Hungary recently announced they would publish government data
as CC BY. Local governments in Britain and Ireland have started publishing
open data. This is somewhere where we could create some valuable stories and
reuse of the data: software hacker types to pore through the data and make
it usable and presentable and Wikimedians to write up stories around it.

Producing original news stories might be slightly more interesting than 'Yet
Another Google Maps Mashup' hacks which is usually what is done with the
data. It would also produce stories that would be unavailable elsewhere,
and, you never know, we might even break a big story and bring down a
government or something. ;-)

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


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