[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the
> upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a
> Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his
> departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1]

Stewards had difficulties because Cary is not Volunteer Coordinator
anymore, although organizing elections is not too hard task. Cary
organized the first elections in 2011, although he was not VC anymore.
2009-2010 were not so bright years for stewards. *Fortunately*, on
last two elections we've got a couple of stewards who deal more with
stewards meta issues, although both elections were on the edge not to
be held. Just because of Cary we had those elections.

> That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors.
> Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I
> never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am
> all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more
> bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community
> members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they
> should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care
> about what happens next.

The same is with positions which require more specific organizational
and professional knowledge than just writing articles in wiki code.
Editing encyclopedia is quite different than editing news edition.
Tasks of Wikinews editors (not journalists/contributors, editors) are
comparable to the tasks of WMF management. You have to have employed
people to take care about paying bills, otherwise you won't have
servers. Similarly, you have to have people who care about integrity
of Wikinews, otherwise you won't have functional news source.

While I prefer to see volunteers to do the job, I would be happy to
explain to one employee (better from community background than not)
how to program, maintain and develop those bots.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

The answer on this question is the same as above. Did we abandon
Wikipedia just because it was necessary to have WMF employees?

I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need
for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would
be Wikinews community.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it
> can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty
> of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators,
> micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not
> hard if you know how to tap into it.

Wikinews can compete with large sites. And not just that! Wikinews is
the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day
(there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per
day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly
organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future
more than any other project.