[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Lodewijk]

Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com>:
<snip>

>
> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
> never able to capitalize on this.
>
> Theo
>
>
Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite
diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual
white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the 'global
south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc
etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're
only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch
language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the
Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to
be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse,
but on many others we're not.

It is this potential that does matter though - but to achieve that, we
should work on it.

But more importantly - you are correct that Wikinews' user base is simply
too small. You can theoretically write an encyclopedia with 3 skilled
people, as long as you take your time and do a hell lot of research.
However, this is not true for a news source - to make that work you always
need up to date everything, you need to cover the latest news and have
interesting research. If Wikipedia stands still for a week (no edits) we can
just continue after that. If the New York Times would do the same, most
likely they have lost a lot of their readers. Continuity and masses are even
more important for Wikinews than for Wikipedia to make it work.

Therefore, I'm not so sure if forking is good per se. Wikinews was already
too small to my liking, and splitting it up might bring the community even
further below the critical mass. At the same time it might bring the
apparently needed changes for some, and make them work - I do hope though
that both communities will quickly figure out what methods work best, and
join together again to make it more likely to pass this threshold of
activity.

Lodewijk