[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

[Carl Peterson]

On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Peter Jacobi wrote:
> > "Andrew Lih" <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> FYI, German Wikipedia is more in line with the idea that "not every
> >> news event deserves an article." They are much more selective and are
> >> not shy in telling you so. :)
> >>
> >
> > Yeah. I've recently managed to get an "Wikipedia is not a News Portal"
> > into the German equivalent of [[WP:WWIN]]. But this POV seems to collide
> > with the consensus at enwiki.
> >
>
> I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering
> everything.  I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent
> news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover.  The
> solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older
> events more.  I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time
> periods!  Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered
> events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child
> kidnappings?  What about the thousands of political scandals, major and
> minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced
> cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.?  It's all good info we're missing!
>
> -Mark
>
> My personal opinion is that Wikinews is for stuff that is too recent to
have reliable and verifiable sourcing. Wikipedia is for when the smoke has
cleared and there is verifiable information. I think about how many times
something has been reported by every single news outlet and then later
retracted by every single news outlet because of misinformation. I'm
thinking specifically of the mining accident a few months ago where the
newspapers ran the story about finding nearly all the miners alive, when
that morning, as people were reading their papers, the TV news stations were
reporting the exact opposite.

Carl