[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss at verizon.net> wrote:

> I thought the Wikimedia community should know that a large portion of WIkinews' contributor base has forked into its own project (http://theopenglobe.org) after becoming deeply dissatisfied with Wikinews. The new wiki has finished its creation stage and is about ready to publish news articles.

Hello Tempo,

Good luck.  What are the differences between the vision for OpenGlobe
and the current practice of English Wikinews?


Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
What are the costs and technical or other work involved?  MZM, you are
confused in this thread - Wikimedia doesn't exist to serve EN:WP, or
to serve its most popular *current* project, it exists to support the
global dissemination of all sorts of knowledge, and collaboration to
create that knowledge.

That doesn't necessarily mean we need to host projects covering all
sorts of knowledge -- we could support merging of our existing
projects into other great projects online -- and we should review
regularly how we can support cousin projects like WikiHow and
Wikitravel.  But it certainly means we need to find better ways to
improve the availability of freely-licensed collaborative news online,
and doing something about it.[1]

SJ

[1] News is an interesting case, because -- as is not true for
quotations, dictionary entries, or primary sources -- we *do*
contribute dramatically to coverage of current events via Wikipedia.
We just haven't yet successfully bridged that popular and effective
channel of work and interest with Wikinews or other news-focused
projects.  The only other project in a similar situation is
Wikispecies, where any data on species at least conceptually is
welcome in a Wikipedia article on the topic.