[Wikinews-l] Wikinews is too rigid? Introducing some flexibility? New contributors?

Sun Sep 6 06:27:24 UTC 2009

All,
I've been kicking around some thoughts for a while, and I felt it was time
to share and see if I can get some feedback on and maybe some traction for
change.

== Long Version ==
We all want new contributors, after all, there is like 20 of us that are
really active at any given time.  Hell, I could probably give the names of
everyone that is reasonably active on Wikinews off the top of my head.  We
all know when someone goes missing, because something drops, either article
output falls a few articles a day or audio wikinews ceases to exist all
together, or the review queue backups. Wikinews biggest problem is burn out,
we _all_ have to contribute a significant amount of time or the project dies
(See also: Holidays).

So how do we get new contributors?

KISS.  Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Our "defining guide" is [[WN:SG]].  Who here
can honestly say they've read every single line?  I'm sure a few can, but I
know I haven't.  It is 20 printed pages.  The only "easier" guide on getting
started that I know of is [[Wikinews:Writing an article]] and that is 6
pages, that is still too length in my book.   We should have a goal that a
new user  (who understands Wiki-syntax) can come in, read the basics and get
started writing in less than X time.  What is X time? I'd say 15 minutes,
tops.

Second part, user interest in the topic.  I'm interested in many things, but
I'm not that much of a news writer that I think I can scratch out 3 decent
paragraphs on it, which is our minimum.  This leads to me to my next
point...

While I love what goes on with Wikinews, sometimes I get the feeling that
we're too rigid.  As mentioned previously our Style Guide is lengthy, and
not only is it the guide - it is basically our rules for publishing.  Part
of that is that we must have 3 paragraphs.  While I think that is great
because it forces us to push up the quality of articles... but we set the
bar very high for new contributors.  You can come into Wikipedia and create
a new article with one sentence and it might have a chance of staying around
and becoming worth while.  Wikinews, it won't, period.  I think we might
want consider alternatives to the "regular article" and what standards we
should have for those.  Hopefully these can lower the barrier to entry, and
give us some flexibility into helping people get their stories published
rather than the flat "too short, stale, delete it" mind set.

For example: Shorts, local & photo journalism.  All 3 of these types of news
we accept in some form now, but maybe not as easily as should.  For example
shorts have to be combined into a days worth of shorts (with at least 2 or 3
stories).  Local news is the same as any other news.  Photo Journalism?
Well I haven't seen too much of it, and that which I've personally
submitted, I've had to beg and bribe (ok, mostly bribing) to get it
published without 3 paragraphs of accompanying text.

We could consider adding something like "Shorts: " to the beginning of a
short story, and allowing it to go as a one paragraph story.  We could even
have a "Shorts" category that would exclude it from being published in the
"Latest News" section on the Main Page we have now.  Maybe it can have it's
own little section on the front page.  Local could follow the same theory,
allow it to be shorter in order to entice users to come and write a little
bit about their on goings of their home town.  If they write something
large/long/good enough we'll even remove the "hide from 'latest news' flag"
(What ever that would be) and that would push it up out of the dark depths.
That entices people to not only come and start (because it is easier to
write one paragraph) but it also entices them to write more/better as they
get more accustomed to our way of doing things because they want their
article to get more promotion.

Photo Journalism.  Basically if the user is submitting a majority of
pictures (say more than 5-6 pictures of an Event), the requirements for
writing anything more than clear and concise caption should be tossed out
the window.  How many people go to events and take a bunch of pictures that
could be turned into an interesting "Photo Essay" (or what ever you want to
call it) that turn away from Wikinews because they don't want to write
paragraphs and paragraphs?  I know that I personally have opt'd to not
"cover" something because I didn't think I could manage to write 3
paragraphs on what ever it was.  Hey, I'm a photog, not a writer.  That even
was on my Accreditation Request, it's not like it was a secret.

Something that is underlying to all of this that I haven't mentioned
previously:  We need to make Wikinews _single writer friendly_ NOW.  It has
long since been established that unless something major is going on, you are
probably going to be the only one writing an article.  If we start to pull
in people covering local events, this is going to be doubly so.  So we need
to do everything in our power to make the process friendly for one person to
go through.  I honestly don't have any suggestion on what that should be,
other than to keep that in mind.

Lastly, I'd like to propose the addition of one optional step to our
publishing process.  A {{Copy Edit}} or similarly named template that
basically states "Hey, I've finished this article, but I'd appreciate it if
someone would copy edit this article before placing it into review".  Again,
personal experience, I'm not a very good writer, I know my work needs to be
copy edited.  Why not make it easier for the copy editors out there to seek
out what they should work on.  I've got two people who I've managed to drag
in on occasion to do copy editing because they are good at it.  I've only
done it for my work, or what I happen to see as being egregiously bad.

== Short Version ==
* Make short versions of our key "getting started" documents (WN:SG,
Wikinews:Writing an article, etc)
* Allow single story Shorts (Won't be published under "Latest News")
* Allow short local news (Similar to Shorts)
* Allow Photo Journalism stories w/o text (other than captions)
* Make WN writing process "Single User" friendly
* Add optional {{Copy Edit}} step to publishing process.

Sorry all that this was so long, but I've been mulling over these issues for
a while.  I'm CC'ing scoop in hopes of getting more people to reply to this
mail.

-- 
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]]
http://snowulf.com/ - Blog
http://snowulf.imagekind.com/ - Pictures
This has been a test of the emergency sig system.
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