[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Sue Gardner]

On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
>> What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
>
> Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website
> rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
> original research and never really had very much of it. It is also
> operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the
> field pretty much to itself when it started.


On the English Wikinews [1] at least, it's seemed to me that part of
the issue is that different editors are working on different genres of
news. Some do celebrity coverage, others do investigative work or
collaborative coverage of breaking events, etc. Those are quite
different value propositions that appeal to different types of
readers, and I would think that Wikinews has simply never produced
enough critical mass of any one genre, sufficient to create and
maintain a large readership that wants that genre.

Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is
because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to
look like. I think that's true, and I think Wikinews has suffered in
comparison, because there are many different types of news, not just
one.

Thanks,
Sue


[1] the only one I personally can read