[Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed

[Andrew Gray]

2009/11/5 Peter Coombe <thewub.wiki at googlemail.com>:
> Wikinews has it's problems, and is often overshadowed by it's bigger
> brother Wikipedia. But it certainly hasn't failed. There's a
> respectable amount of content being produced, including original
> reporting that just would not fit on Wikipedia. Articles are picked up
> by Google News (at least, they will be again once a bug is fixed). And
> there is a fairly small but dedicated community.

Mmm.

It's fair to say that Wikinews has not exploded massively, or become a
first-rank household-name service like Wikipedia has. It'd be great if
it did, of course, but not doing so isn't a sign of failure!

We did astonishingly, staggeringly, unbelievably, improbably well with
Wikipedia. Failing to replicate that is to be expected; it's unlikely
we could deliberately manage such a success without a shedload of good
luck. "It's got a wiki in it" isn't a magic spell, after all.

Wikinews is, as Pete says, flourishing quietly; it has a community, it
has readers - though I'd be interested to see figures - and it is
making steps in the outside world, reaching people and making a niche
independently of its "big sibling" Wikipedia. It's not become a
top-ten website, it's not a household name, but then, neither are the
other sites working in this field.

The readership of the English Wikinews is 8m pageviews/month; this is
only about 50% less than the English Wikiquote or Wikisource, both
quite stable and regarded projects. There's certainly a core of people
out there who read it, and who are presumably satisfied enough to keep
doing so. The authors enjoy writing it; the readers continue to, well,
continue to read it. Administratively and technically, it's a small
cost; from a volunteer perspective, the loss to the other projects of
people who might be working on them is offset by the fact that there's
a definite social benefit to keeping multiple projects so that people
can change what they're working on for a whle rather than burn out and
leave entirely. And, of course, people who actively want to write
journalism have somewhere to do it.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk