On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 11:55 +0100, Brian McNeil wrote:
Great to hear another Wikinews is about to launch. If sr.wikipedia has a newsletter you need to get a call for participation in it.
The most of people from sr.wikipedia I know personally and they are introduced in Wikinews launch. However, I didn't make explicit call to all of them because I am waiting to see is my concept (getting Beta news from Serbia and one or two science/technology news written by me) is working. However, I'll make a call soon.
We should be able to help you get set up with an RSS feed and a ticker like en.wikinews once you're public. I believe CraigSpurrier is the person to speak to about that.
Yes, it would be helpful. We have one bot (operated by User:Kaster, who was maintaining the project from the beginning up to now) which is synchronizing weather data.
I reorganized sr.wikinews to be compatible with en.wikinews and I want to keep it so. So, I think that making RSS shouldn't be a problem... Also, I'll start with adding interwikis between Wikinews:<date> aggregators.
The other thing which I would like for sr.wikinews is, of course, readers comments. Is it possible that someone of you asks developers for that? I know to say only "I want comments like on en.wikinews" :) but it is possible that it is not enough of informations.
From the perspective of the English Wikinews we'd love if you can help translate sr. stories over and someone should copyedit them. We get very little news from your part of the world and having local reporters getting stories out to a wider audience is always welcome.
Can you explain more about this arrangement with Beta? I'm not exactly clear if they're dual licensing stuff CC-BY 2.5 for you, or want to pick up your material, or - as is ideal - both.
They want to give their short news under CC-BY 2.5 for sr.wikinews :) Generally, there is no difference for them to keep or not short news under full copyright or CC-BY because anyone may copy their news from the site and use it de facto under CC-BY. So, we made a deal that they officially "makes a donation" to sr.wikinews (and possibly to en.wikinews) with their short news for linking their news back (which is WN default, but we are making an organized effort for adopting their news). In short, both Beta and Wikinews are not giving anymore which they were giving before and both of them are making benefits :) (At least for news in Serbian I'll try to make similar deals with other news agencies.)
We made a deal in May 2006, but I didn't have a time to implement it. When I started to do that, I contacted Ljubica Markovic, director of Beta, and we will make a meeting after November 16th to formalize the deal (Wikimedia Serbia and Beta should sign some kind of agreement).
I am using their RSS feed in Serbian [1] for news in Serbian. As all of the news are short, it is completely according to our deal. However, RSS feed in English [2] contains much more text per news and I am not sure are they willing to give those news under CC-BY, and I'll know that when we meet after November 16. Also, it may be possible to automatically connect news in Serbian with news in English because I will talk with a person from their IT department. So, ideally, no one should translate news from Serbian to English.
In this moment we don't have a lot of materials, so there is no sense to talk with them about picking up our material. The only original sr.wikinews articles will be two of my articles per day about science and technology (and maybe one bigger per week). When I realize that we have enough of unique material, I'll announce it not only to Beta, but to other media in Serbian, too.
BTW, do we (WN) have some admin on Toolserver? Or at least someone who may help me there? I don't know why my script is not working automatically... (If there is someone, please contact me personally.)
[1] - http://www.beta.co.yu/rssvd.asp [2] - http://www.beta.co.yu/rssen.asp