[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Tom Morris]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I
wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the
smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi,
French and Hungarian.

At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish
Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number
of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often
have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can
access both current news and a historical archive of news with
verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context
provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for
democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media
available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be
free-as-in-freedom are good too.

This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less
availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And,
yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the
BBC...)

[1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>