[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/15/11 8:50 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lih<andrew.lih at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the 
>> servers running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to 
>> Wikipedia's community fundamentals for encyclopedia writing. 
> "running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never
> heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF
> (in relation to content projects, of course).

This just brings us back to the function of the WMF.  At one it was just 
a matter of keeping the servers running, and ensuring that the content 
remains available forever. To the discomfort of some that role has expanded.

> Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs
> also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has
> given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for
> writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those
> things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care
> about things when no one else is able to care.

I don't know about that.  Wikisource already has more scanned books 
available than it can handle, even if we just limit ourselves to those 
where the public domain status is absolutely indisputable.  A relatively 
small numbers should still be scanned for the sake of 
comprehensiveness.  The big challenge is in how to make this useful to a 
larger audience.

I don't see a big money issue for Wiktionary either.

The WM-CA medicine project still comes down to one dedicated person 
funding the scholarship. For now it's experimental, but its future 
depends on an analysis of the current experiment.

The fact remains that none of your examples involves hiring someone. 
What's the point of hiring someone for Wikinews before we even know 
where it's heading.  The volunteer community would still need to define 
that person's job.
>> Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be
>> great to see more moves into that area.
> Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and
> one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass
> around it.
Collectively I'm sure we can do better than one feature per month.  If 
Serbian Wikinews can do something different that's fine too.

Ray