În mar., 16 apr. 2019 la 12:38, Dan Garry (Deskana) <djgwiki(a)gmail.com> a scris:
Splitting off the Wikinews discussion from the branding discussion...
On Tue, 16 Apr 2019 at 07:52, Jennifer Pryor-Summers <
jennifer.pryorsummers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Compared to Wikitribune it is! But more
importantly, if Wikinews is not
thriving, then why not? Does it lack resources? What could or should the
WMF do to revive it?
In my opinion, nothing. Wikinews was a nice idea, but it didn't work out,
and I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation investing resources into trying
to bring it back to life is really worth it. In fact, I think the Wikimedia
Foundation isn't the right group to try to breathe new life into the
project anyway—we, as a volunteer community, could invest our time in
bringing new content into it. That doesn't happen though. Why is that? For
me, I'm voting with my actions rather than my words—it's because it just
isn't important enough compared to other things. It's okay to think that.
I personally believe the law of the hammer [1] had a very significant
contribution to the launch of Wikinews (as well as Wikiversity,
Wikispecies and Wiktionary): "we have a wiki, what else can we use it
for?" Stated differently ("we have a mission and an idea aligned with
that mission, what kind of wiki would we need for that?") the outcome
might have been radically different. Some projects might have never
happened, others might have been years ago where they are now and
again others might have happened later (e.g. a wiki does not seem a
great fit for University courses, but Wikiversity might have happened
anyway as part of the OpenAccess movement. Or not).
It's a bit late to change history, but it's not too late to admit some
of the projects are a failure in the current form and start again - or
just drop them. As somebody else in the conversion put it "we must
have ways to try and fail fast".
Strainu
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
Also, I'd prefer to see the Wikimedia Foundation trying to do fewer things
but do them better rather than taking more on; I think the annual plan
reflects that it is trying to do so.
Perhaps some of the money spent on rebranding
would
be better spent on the projects that are not doing so well as the big
Wikipedias -- or perhaps the WMF should cut its losses and close them down,
on the principle of reinforcing success instead.
I suspect that significantly less money is being spent on this rebranding
effort than people might think. A short engagement with an external
consultant, and some staff time to think about it and publish some pages to
solicit comment, is a relatively small investment compared to what it might
take to bootstrap improvements to breathe life into a mostly dead project.
I don't think it's really helpful to guess about the cost of things... yes,
I broke my own rule right at the start of this paragraph. ;-)
Dan
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