[WikiEN-l] The terrorists have won

[stevertigo]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:35 AM, George Herbert<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some things are not easily describable and modelable in the in-wiki
> mental model and process.

Things that are not "describable and modelable in the in-wiki" but are
so in the private news org model? Hm. Pay, danger, and reputation
first come to mind.

> We are not currently prepared to be entirely community-wide
> consensusly responsible and ethical and consistent about some news
> stories which are actively evolving.  We're not supposed to be doing
> that anyways.  We're an encyclopedia (WP, at least), not a news
> source.  Applying our "build an encyclopedia" logic, ethics, structure,
> consensus to other types of information may work particularly badly.

Well news orgs, aside from a few things, are doing it mostly right.
Wikinews didn't set out to be a news org at first, and it still isn't,
for the simple reason that adding a little Hawaiian word (with very
non-English phonosemantics) to the front of whatever English
word/concept does not mean something real will come out of it.

> We do other things badly.

And we are good at those.

Stevertigo

"You are a light.. the calm in the day"