[Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project

[Erik Moeller]

Andrew-
> RfA isn't quite a reputation system like Slashdot karma or eBay's
> ratings. Adminship is a one-time bar to pass, usually for life, and
> there are is no metric to capture  the highs and lows of a
> contributor's performance.

This is the case for Wikinews as well - see the proposal.

>> * establish workflow - [[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]],
>> [[Wikipedia:Peer review]], [[m:Article validation]]

> But these are completely optional, and not required at all for article
> writing.

That's true, but as you yourself state:

> There is a notable difference between Wikipedia and Wikinews -- the
> matter of deadlines and edition time. Wikipedia's content is
> continually morphing. But for news to be news, it must be frozen at
> one point in time, and that puts Wikinews within a different dynamic.

Also, it is very likely that we will have a stable (or milestone) edition  
of Wikipedia, which would make the two processes very similar.

I don't buy your sharp distinction between Wikipedia and Wikinews. First  
of all, because Wikipedia content doesn't undergo a publishing phase, any  
article at any given time can contain all of the things you mention. I've  
had to remove claims about some guy being a child pornographer or a  
pedophile out of Wikipedia articles which had been there for months and  
successfully re-inserted by anonymous users. If the guy had been hostile  
to Wikipedia, he could certainly have made a case that we haven't done our  
job of policing the content on our site. All of Fred Bauder's nightmare  
scenarios are equally applicable in this context.

Even when an article has actually undergone community review, many of the  
risks remain. That's why we have disclaimers like "Wikipedia does not  
provide legal advice", and why we have endless discussions about obscenity  
and pornography.

What it boils down to is this: The Wikinews community has to make damn  
sure that their reports are backed up by hard evidence. The fact checking  
process has to be solid. However, keep in mind that a site like Slashdot,  
with millions of visitors per month, has managed to operate for more than  
7 years without any serious threats to its existence, even though they  
have virtually no fact-checking in place besides the readers, even though  
they regularly challenge the law by doing things like linking to copy  
prevention circumvention-devices, and even though they do publish original  
reports on a regular basis, much of them hearsay ("I just did this check  
on Microsoft's DRM, and .."), in a field where money is very, very  
dominant and lawyers are always waiting to be unleashed.

My proposal is much more conservative than Slashdot's model, with a solid  
fact-checking and review process in place before anything is officially  
published. You can't have it both ways, BTW -- making it more open for  
including original reports makes it more vulnerable to legal threats. You  
are in effect arguing for an even more conservative approach, but even the  
current one is being attacked by some as too "un-wiki-like". I am trying  
to find a reasonable middle ground here.

Wikinews initially will be fairly low-profile and hence at low risk of  
being targeted legally. As the project grows, I am sure we will find  
people who can assist us in the legal review of the articles we publish -  
as we have found such people for Wikipedia. But you will never be able to  
eliminate all risks - not within Wikipedia, not within Wikinews.

The time is now to start this project, to bring the people together and to  
formulate the rules of publishing. As a journalist, I am well aware of the  
risks. We will tread carefully and gain more confidence as we grow. Such  
is the way of the wiki. Fear is not an option.

Regards,

Erik