Pe sâmbătă, 27 aprilie 2019, Jennifer Pryor-Summers <
jennifer.pryorsummers(a)gmail.com> a scris:
Strainu,
Simply leaving the world of news to others is not really an option for the
Foundation.
The foundation doesn't really have a say in this. They might
push really hard for a wiki, but if the community isn't there, it's money
thrown away. They might just as well employ a bunch of journalists to write
articles, it won't make it a successful project.
Recall that its vision is that
By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential
infrastructure of the
ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision
will be able
to join us.
That is the strategic direction of the movement. I see no promise there,
explicit or implicit, that a news wiki should or will exist. It just says
it should be easy for people to join our current projects, whatever they
are.
The WMF mission is even narrower: to empower and engage people around the
world to collect and develop *educational content* under a free license or
in the public domain, and to disseminate it *effectively and globally* (my
emphasis). It is highly debatebable if news beyond what Wikipedia covers
are educational. The mission also suggests that we should pick our battles
in order to be effective (don't forget that the discussion so far has been
mostly about the English wikinews, the status of other language versions is
even worse)
It can't achieve that by abandoning news.
News and wikinews are 2 different things. Wikinews is just a tool. If
another tool works better, why not use that instead?
Strainu
JPS
On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 6:29 PM Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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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