[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is
> what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was
> built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still
> be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better
> work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are
> passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid
> to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.

Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be
accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were
replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the
problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.

For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for
Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on
many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't
have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews
editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things
for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time
the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just
had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find
someone who would program that bot?

The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I
have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow
without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews
edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News
services regularly have more than 100 news per day.

I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which
English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing
articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant
community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news
service is not a news service without constant care, which could be
done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per
month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not
at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not
one article on Wikipedia.