[Wikinews-hotline] Wikinews Hotline: Shut down

[Ilya Haykinson]

Hi all,

In accordance with the discussion at
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/proposals#Wikinews_Hotline,
the Wikinews Hotline has been shut down. The primary reasons were cost
of maintenance, combined with lack of use.

I wanted to thank everyone who is subscribed to this list. The hotline
was always an experiment, and a pretty rare experiment for a community
news organization. While I'm disappointed that it never really worked,
I am happy that we got to try this approach.

The door on something like the hotline is not closed. I continue to
believe in the power of telephone-based reporting from the field.
However, I would encourage anyone intending to try this again in the
future to think about the usefulness of the hotline first. For the
hotline to be successful, there need to be a lot of people who have
this number programmed into their phones -- with the Wikinews Hotline
this had never happened, even though it was on the Wikinews homepage
for several years.

I will leave this list running, unless it becomes a haven for spam, in
case someone wants to bring the hotline back.

-ilya haykinson