[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Thomas Dalton]

On 13 September 2011 13:06, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24,  <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>> It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
>> paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
>> the project always stays above the critical mass.
>
> That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news
> source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned
> that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I
> said, heresy, For his ears :P

If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we
should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional
project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to
do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation.
We shouldn't stray away from that.

So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using
volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the
critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to
stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?