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

Wed Sep 7 09:20:56 UTC 2011

I'm not about to re-subscribe to the waste of time that is foundation-l,
just to comment that Ilya's remarks are by-and-large correct.

Wikinews is not as successful as it should be due to the 800lb gorilla
that is Wikipedia. That's no reason to kill it off - especially
considering that many of those I'm informed are participating in this
little discussion have me, personally, at the top of their "hit lists".
[If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out Tony1.]

Put your own house in order first, gentlemen.

Wikipedia *still* does not enforce their "not a news site" policy, and
it is an utter waste of time bringing such up; numerous selfish
Wikipedians reject efforts to direct news-writing efforts to Wikinews. I
neither know, nor care, if this is because they're incapable of writing
to the high quality standards Wikinews sets; or, because they prefer
their egos being stroked by Wikipedia's high page-hit counts on articles
where they wrote a dozen or less words.

Trying to roll Wikinews back into Wikipedia would be a disaster. There
are, as said, too many people who've been sitting, patiently, sharpening
knives in preparation to kill "the red-headed stepchild of the WMF".
And, Wikipedia could never ever handle original reporting.

That Wikinews is, currently, being used for a second semester of course
assignments from an Australian university is - to me - a clear
indication that what we do is valid, and valuable.

Brian McNeil.
-- 
Email: brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org
WikiMedia UK, interim Scottish coordinator/GLAM-MGS liaison.
Wikinews Accredited Reporter | "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."

On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 15:54 -0700, Ilya Haykinson wrote:
> In my opinion (as a one-time active Wikinews Bureaucrat, I helped
> drive forward many of the early site policies, though not including
> the new review regime), I think Wikinews problems run far deeper than
> the burden of reviews.
> 
> 
> At issue is the purpose of the project. Our early goals were to have
> a) a wiki structure that delivers b) an NPOV article base that is c)
> available under an open-content license allowing reuse. Of these
> three, I think we'd done pretty well by b) and c). We hadn't however,
> managed to attract a _growing_ user base to make a) really
> functional. 
> 
> 
> Unlike all other Wikimedia projects, Wikinews cannot succeed via
> slow-but-steady improvement. We can't add one article a day and over
> time build a site with 10,000 relevant articles: we'd still end up
> with a site that has only one relevant article and a ton of
> maybe-historically-useful archives. Thus, we would require a lot of
> people contributing and reviewing things in order to achieve
> constantly high throughput and retain relevance. 
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, Wikinews always had a problem with attracting a huge
> user base. We had to rely on a few hundred semi-active contributors,
> and maybe only a few dozen very committed people. We also would have a
> bunch of people who misunderstood the purpose of Wikinews and would
> post stories about their dogs, or biased rants, or things that were
> impossible to confirm given no sources ("accident on corner of 4th and
> broadway, 3 people hurt"). So our response was to focus on quality and
> process, rather than purely quantity. This meant that if a user showed
> up with a drive-by article creation -- dumping an article onto a page
> that was clearly not in the right shape to be published -- we would
> wait for someone to improve it. If nobody did, it got deleted or
> marked as abandoned.
> 
> 
> Imagine a Wikipedia in which every article makes it onto the homepage,
> immediately or within hours after creation. Either you have to have a
> lot of people to improve every article to some reasonable standards,
> or you need to have a process that requires high quality from the
> start but has a side-effect that restricts quantity. The latter is the
> direction in which Wikinews has headed over the last several years,
> and I think that's why we have always had (and continue having) people
> who're unable to publish legitimate stories: the process is just not
> optimized for this.
> 
> 
> My recommendation has been, for several years, to close Wikinews as an
> independent entity and add a "News" tab to Wikipedia. Just like Talk
> and main namespaces have different standards, the News namespace would
> follow Wikinews-like guidelines for what's acceptable. Articles would
> be closely tied to summary encyclopedic articles. It would be easy to
> create news summary pages. The (comparatively) huge number of
> Wikipedia editors would largely prevent low-quality articles from
> remaining in prominent positions. We could, thus, enable easy open
> editing capabilities. I continue strongly standing by this
> recommendation. I don't know whose call it would be to make this
> happen.
> 
> 
> I don't mean to discount the great successes of Wikinews to date.
> Nobody believed that it was possible to have a high-quality,
> community-contributed, _and_ generally-NPOV news source, and I think
> that we showed that it was possible. We managed to add original
> reporting to the site, and create a process that monitors for certain
> kinds of editorializing or NPOV abuse -- we're rare in the Wikimedia
> community for effectively allowing and encouraging original reporting.
> We've also managed to have several scoops over the years.
> 
> 
> However, I still believe that the experiment is largely not a
> successful one, since readership and editorship is too low to be
> relevant in the news marketplace. In my suggestion (and probably many
> others that also advocate radical change in leveraging Wikipedia) we
> could preserve lots of the great things that came out of the
> experiment. This takes some initiative, and again I'm not sure if we
> even know whose initiative it would take.
> 
> 
> -ilya haykinson
> 
> On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, Andre Engels wrote:
>         On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
>         <putevod at mccme.ru>wrote:
>         
>         > Can not you just introduce a flag of a "trusted editor",
>         similar to an
>         > autoreviewer? I mean, if the news creator is a en.wp
>         administrator most
>         > probably he/she is not a vandal trying to post junk in the
>         Google News. Why
>         > this message should have been reviewed at all?
>         >
>         
>         I'd go even further - Wikinews was born from the wiki
>         movement, wasn't it?
>         Having extensive, multi-tier checks before something is
>         accepted is
>         decidedly unwiki. The wiki way is to assume that not just
>         hardened
>         wikimedians but also most though not all newbies are
>         well-intending. The
>         wiki way is to say 'yes' quickly, but with the revert button
>         easily
>         reachable.
>         
>         --
>         André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
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> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> -ilya
> 
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