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

[Erik Moeller]

Andrew-
> I'm heartened to hear the "grow it" strategy. Perhaps I was alarmed
> because the initial document on meta was quite ambitious. The Slashdot
> comparison is intriguing, but I tend to think of their community as a
> fleet of pundit robots from [[MST3K]], rather than a solid reporting
> crew. :)

Their unprofessionality is exactly the point. If they can pull this off  
without any quality standards whatsoever, then surely we, with good checks  
and balances in place, can do so as well.

> Perhaps the biggest question is that blogging and Wikipedia editing is
> largely done "in your pajamas" sitting at home. Just what level of
> original reporting can we expect to see with Wikinews? Will there be
> much pounding the pavement and getting street interviews? Photography?

One of my key arguments for Wikinews is that it can be immediately useful,  
even without any original reporting - just by being a good summary of the  
news on a wide variety of subjects. Even if we start out by say, having  
primarily Linux-related news, we can still be a wiki-based competition to  
something like Slashdot or Linuxjournal. And as we get more volunteers, we  
can expand our focus.

As for the "pyjama problem", we already have a huge number of Wikimedians  
going out and taking photos of people, places and things. The Wikimedia  
Commons is growing up to be a nice repository of stock photography,  
getting more than 1000 uploads in its first month. I'm sure there will be  
volunteers for news reporting "on the spot" in cases of major events.  
Maybe we can provide easy interfaces for PDAs and smartphones.

Accredition is part of the reason that the Wikinews proposal distinguishes  
between witnesses and accredited reporters. I want to build Wikinews into  
a medium that has credibility, so that our volunteers can get access to  
press conferences and events just as regular reporters would.

> Also, a good starting point for recruitment would be to contact the
> folks listed at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_Corps

Thanks. I think if we start by announcing this project internally - on the  
village pumps, the [[current events]] pages, and so on - we will get a  
reasonably large "seed" of editors. Once we have the basic policies and  
site structure hammered out, we can move on to getting a press release out  
into the blogosphere, which should attract the kind of people who are  
disillusioned with Indymedia or who never agreed with their ideology in  
the first place. I believe this is a huge open opportunity waiting for us  
to be seized before someone else does.

Regards,

Erik