[Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[pi zero]

Having only a few hours ago been alerted to the existence of this thread,
I'm afraid I'm rather overwhelmed by it.  Way too long to read.  I've
glimpsed a number of false/misleading statements about en.wn in passing, but
would probably spent all night properly locating them all, let alone
attempting to answer them.  (Hm, there was something about Wikinews being a
bureaucracy, and of course the post that started this thread...)  I'm also
rather puzzled by the nature of this thread, which seems to be largely
non-Wikinewsies discussing what they think about how the inner workings
ought to be changed of a sister project whose *current* inner workings are
probably more unfamiliar to ---for a non-random example--- Wikipedians than
those of any other sister.  (I've spent three years studying it and am
hopefully just about up to speed now.)

However, in a general collegial spirit toward Wikimedians having a
discussion (whyever they're doing that), I'll offer a few general remarks
about en.wn.

en.wn is a wiki at, roughly, the extreme opposite end of several spectra
from en.wp.  To oversimplify (the only way I'll get anywhere in this), en.wn
is just about as different a wiki from en.wp as it is possible for a wiki to
be.  Note, there is nothing un-wiki about en.wn.  It's very wiki.  What it
*isn't* is Wikipedian.  Some Wikipedians, I think, are actually kind of
afraid of en.wn, because all wmf wikis are drive by idealism, and part of
the idealism of Wikipedia is a belief in various rules of wiki dynamics that
aren't the way en.wn works.  Volunteers driven by idealism naturally have a
massive emotional investment in those ideals ---that's what makes idealism
great for sister projects!--- and in this case it means these Wikipedians
have a massive emotional investment in disbelieving in the way en.wn works.

The thing is, Wikinews confronts boldly, every day for several years now,
challenges of quality control that Wikipedia is glacially slowly being
forced to sidle up to if it is to thrive on into the future.  These are
*really difficult challenges*, and I'm kind of amazed by how well we're
dealing with this stuff that Wikipedia isn't ready for yet.  Obviously
Wikipedia will never be Wikinews, but... Wikinews is the vanguard, and
Wikipedia will eventually benefit from things we're figuring out (very, very
slowly, but that's hardly surprising).

A note on a slightly different tack.  A comment I made in a private
discussion a few days ago (among experienced Wikinewsies, about the inner
workings of the project) ran something like this:
> I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as homework.
Besides the somewhat incidental fact I'm proud of the project, there are two
points of interest here.

First, we do have a class of, I think, about thirty university journalism
students currently submitting articles for review.  Yes, that can produce a
glut on the review queue, which we're learning how to keep up with and not
allow it to keep us from reviewing the best articles in reasonable time.  Of
course we *also* want to spend a significant amount of time reviewing the
*worse* articles, because how can those authors improve without feedback?
Tricky.  This also means an especially high number of failing article
reviews.  Some of these students honestly don't get at first the concept of
neutrality, or perhaps how to not plagiarize, or some other basic
principle.  Last semester we were surprised by how many final-year
journalism students had trouble with this stuff, and we didn't let up our
standards for them, and from what we hear, the professor was *delighted*.
That's apparently just what he wanted, and he's sent another class this
semester to get some hard knocks from us.

The second thing about this, I only figured out myself when I realized
reviewing these student's work reminded me forcefully of my time as a
teaching assistant.  That, plus the recent nomination of the Old English
Wikipedia for closure.  Wmf is about education, and an argument in that
nomination was that the purpose of a Wikipedia is to educate readers by
providing them with information in their native language.  Well, I saw two
fails in that: first, reading it is surely educational *about Old English*,
and second, *contributing* to it is surely massively educational about Old
English.  The idea that contributing is educational applies in spades to
en.wn, obviously, or why would a professor be telling his students to go do
it?

Anyway, there are a few thoughts.