[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[David Gerard]

On 12 September 2011 22:57, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to
> go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English
> Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are
> abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to
> pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical
> support.


Considering Wikinews was started and pushed heavily by Erik Moller
(early on he was personally bailing people up at wikimeets to get them
to contribute to it), I suggest your analysis is on
crack^W^W^Whypothesises too much cause for what is *entirely*
explicable by a small community going insular and going for perceived
quality over outreach. This is particularly given that Wikinews
explicitly put in the heavyweight review infratructure in order to get
in good with Google News. And that review structure is just the sort
of thing one would expect to leave contributors dissatisfied and
feeling utterly un-wiki about bothering.

I don't know what would be an answer. The new site wants to keep a
*lot* less reviewed. But then there's other failure modes for citizen
journalism, e.g. Before It's News, which has been pretty much overrun
by conspiracy theorists.


- d.