[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/14/11 9:12 PM, Milos Rancic wrote:
> 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.
>

I don't think that the Serbian situation scales very well.  100 news 
articles per day is even a lot for readers to handle.  Serbian project 
success depends a lot on the language/country correlation.  It also does 
not take long to get from Belgrade to the furthest part of the country. 
A New Zealand wikinews buried in a larger English language project won't 
attract a lot of attention outside New Zealand.

Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of 
the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a 
major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within 
minutes of the event.  That article and many corrections went on line 
immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.

Ray