[WikiEN-l] [Wikinews-l] Wikipedia's 'In the news'

[Brion Vibber]

El 5/26/09 4:28 AM, Fred Bauder escribió:
> Wikipedia needs to do what is good for Wikipedia, and some news coverage
> is good for Wikipedia. Detailed original reporting is outside Wikipedia's
> mission, as is a sophisticated presentation of the significance of news.
> As things happen, information about them is added to the corpus of human
> knowledge and thus added to Wikipedia.

Wikinews does relatively little to really support firsthand reporting 
either. I'll admit I'm not a hardcore Wikinewsie, but what I've seen 
over the last years has generally been either:

* Original interviews
or
* Re-reporting of news stories in other media

Look at today's top stories:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Trial_against_Church_of_Scientology_begins_in_France
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/North_Korea_conducts_test_of_nuclear_weapon
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Obama_nominates_Sonia_Sotomayor_to_U.S._Supreme_Court
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Cyclone_in_Bay_of_Bengal_kills_at_least_17

All four are just rehashes of information found at other news sites -- 
the sources are all media news outlets: CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, etc.

There is an original reporting section:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Portal:Original_reporting

but the stories are relatively rare, and even many of those seem to be 
basically "a public event happened, here's a description" or "a press 
conference happened, here's some info".


Wikinews lacks a local angle (there's no locality) or a unifying 
political angle (we're supposed to be neutral), either of which could 
make it much easier to organize original reporting. Compare with say 
Indynews, which has a strong political angle and has been much more 
active about providing infrastructure. Editorial quality sometimes 
suffers, but I at least feel like they've got a mission...

-- brion