Fabrice,
I've whitelisted your address for posing to wikinews-l. The mailing list archives are here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
If I see any other posts from NewsTrust people I'll whitelist their email addresses too. You'll only get sent copies of other messages if you subscribe to the mailing list.
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 14:37 -0800, Fabrice Florin wrote:
Dear Brian,
It was great to speak with you yesterday - I'm glad that we got along so well, and that you are interested in working together!
Thank you so much for moving so swiftly to contact your community about a possible collaboration between NewsTrust and Wikinews.
We will discuss this idea in our editorial meeting on Monday. We really appreciate your commitment to factual reporting from a neutral perspective, and it appears that we have many shared values in common.
We are also honored that you are willing to consider using NewsTrust as a possible tool for judging the entries of participants in your upcoming writing contest (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WWC-2010). We will discuss the idea of cross-promoting this contest on both of our sites at the end of January and perhaps again in early or mid-April. A good way to do this might be to use our News Hunt format at that time, if you all find the idea interesting. Read more about our News Hunts below, as well as the attached PDF with more details about NewsTrust.
I am also delighted that you were able to install our NT review buttons so quickly on the Wikimedia article pages. Thanks, bawolff, nicely done! See my response to your comment below.
At your request, we already corrected the misspelling of your name on our source profile page for Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/sources/wikinews
Note that is is now possible for you to add one of our source widgets on your site, listing stories for review from Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/widgets?url=/sources/wikinews/for_review
I'm puzzling over where we could fit that in.
You can customize your widget in many different ways on that page (be sure to click on 'More Options') and we have many topic widgets you might consider putting next to articles that would benefit from more related stories on the same topic.
We've also started to review a couple of your featured stories, which we encourage you to review as well:
I noticed a few were up. Iain (User Blood Red Sandman) was quite pleased with the review he got on the Garuda pilot story. As you probably understand, we can have issues getting those actually involved (such as the pilot) to speak to us.
The one I put up and admitted a COI/writing involvement saw me acting as the reviewing editor, doing quite a lot of copyedit work on it and bringing it in line with house style.
(if you are a co-author of any of these articles, or have any serious conflicts of interest, please check the appropriate box in the 'About You' section of our review form, as Brian was kind enough to do for one of the articles he co-wrote)
Lastly, I also started a Smart Feed for Wikinews here, using your feedburner RSS feed: http://newstrust.net/feeds/180/show
This will make it easier for any of us to submit some of your upcoming stories from your feedburner feed, since much of your metada is automatically pulled from your feed. However, I encourage you to focus on posting some of your best stories, so we don't flood our review pipeline with too many stories from Wikinews right away.
I suspect the metadata on Feedburner is pathetic. We have an extension for MediaWiki developed to produce RSS feeds based on categories and (our) review process.
We are in the middle of a News Hunt on Climate Change, which will keep us busy through the weekend, and I have to prepare for a board meeting at the end of the week, so I will not be able to review any more stories from you guys until the following week. Thanks for your understanding. But if you have any good articles about Social Change, we would be happy to have our community review them, as that will be one of our major themes next week.
I would also like to introduce our associate editor Kaizar Campwala, who is our point person for News Hunts and partnerships. Kaizar can be reached at kaizar@newstrust.net and can answer any other questions you might have about using our service.
Look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks.
All the best,
Fabrice
P.S.: Do you guys know how we could encourage a Wikipedia writer to write an entry about NewsTrust on their site?
Have you independent press reports on NewsTrust? That's the key thing. There's a few Wikipedians also contribute to Wikinews, they might know if there is still a "requesting an article" page on Wikipedia (and where it's hidden).
We understand and respect Wikipedia's rules against writing entries about yourself -- or asking your friends to do it -- so we have not made any attempts to have an entry written about us to date.
But we do think that it would be reasonable for someone to write one, given all that we have contributed to this field over the years (see attached project overview).
It's all down to, unlike Wikinews, Wikipedia having a policy against original research, and being a tertiary source.
If there is a press release or two for NewsTrust then any board or other people might get their Wikipedia articles updated to reflect the position. You can go right ahead and ask for that on an article talk page as long as you disclose your interest.
Example:
"I'm XXX of NewsTrust (http://newstrust.net), this article on <someone> does not mention that he is <positionholder> at NewsTrust. This is verifiable in <link to press releases> and <links to news reports>. Can this detail be added as a redlink to [[w:NewsTrust.net]], or that article actually started? --~~~~"
Would you be willing to nudge an experienced Wikipedia writer interested in this topic to consider us as a worthy subject for an article?
I think I just did. I'll point a few other people at the mailing list archive, it might encourage them.
<snip>
Brian, to answer your question above, clicking on our NT review button on a story that has already been submitted will take you directly to our review form.
Great!
I've had encouraging feedback off-list about tying into NewsTrust's source rating system. Here's how I see us using this:
{{source}}[5] is modified to have an optional "|NT" parameter. Where present, the URL for the cited source is checked for on NewsTrust, the story rating is retrieved, and a (likely smaller than NT uses) graphic of their trust level for the story is displayed somewhere. If NewsTrust doesn't have the story, the ideal is to fall back to their trust level for the source that published the story. Here we're going to run into the usual headaches with wire reports that are everywhere and end up cited as published by Ya-who?
We would be very happy to support any efforts along these lines, and are delighted that you find them worthwhile.
Still waiting to hear if we can pull that information off NewsTrust without having third party site requests that might violate policy.
Now, I pointed Fabrice at the writing contest[6]. I would be very interested in getting the NewsTrust community to review the rules we're running by (the ever-popular "anyone can edit" including, at the moment, the competition rules). It may be possible to do some collaboration on that. NewsTrust could feature our competition a few days before the start, Wikinews invites readers not in the competition to look at ratings on NewsTrust and possibly contribute their own.
We are very happy to support your contest in any way we can, using the current NewsTrust review tools.
But we will let you guys decide how you want to calculate the final scores and award the prizes, as this is a bit outside of our area of expertise.
NewsTrust, I think, would be an ideal group to bring in on the post-competition Featured Article section. That is, all competition entries scanned for FA candidates on Wikinews, and in some way highlighted for review on NewsTrust. At the moment my penned-in idea there is to invite some of the WMF Trustees (a few have journo backgrounds) to get involved in that. The big question is, will offering just five points for an article that gets promoted be enough of a game-changer at that stage? Should it be higher - say 20 points?
I didn't ask Fabrice if they could help out with sponsorship for prizes, so we're still begging for that. Anyone think it would be worth asking on the Wikipedia rewards board if a few of the people who put cash up there might chip together to have a netbook for the outright winner?
Our financial resources are limited, but we could perhaps give away NewsTrust mugs to the winners, if they were selected using our review tools.
I don't see any reason why the mugs couldn't be awarded to the top-rated articles from the competition end-stage after submissions are closed and we're looking for those to promote to featured article status.
The mugs have a list of the core principles of journalism on the back, so they offer more value than just promoting us ;o)
I've pointed people at Kipling for that ;-)