[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
>> mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
>> normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
>> that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
>> to have stalled lately.
>>
>> WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."
>>
>> Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
>>
>> Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.
>
> Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital
> mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find
> some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a
> Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain
> questions to those women?
>
> That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in
> the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in
> the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us
> a whole new depth of coverage.
>
> This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news
> organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and
> collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have
> that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give
> people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to
> have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without
> stifling early efforts.

Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's
very much in line with this.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations
http://vimeo.com/26469276

Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project
covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that
had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the
shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those
interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source
material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it
provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage
audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing
typed words.

-Andrew