[Wikipedia-l] Wikinews demo launches!

[Jama Poulsen]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2004 at 07:05:46PM -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> http://demo.wikinews.org/
> 
> After the successful wikinews vote
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Vote
> 
> the board has discussed and decided to move forward with this project!
> This will also give people more of a chance to discuss the proposed
> policies before the site goes live.

Has anyone been thinking about how Wikinews could cooperate with the
Independent Media Center (IMC) project (http://www.indymedia.org)?

The goals of these two news projects seem quite similar to me, and both
projects could use the technical and editorial help from people at the
other project.

There are ofcourse some challenging issues:
  - legal aspects (organizations, liability, copyrights)
  - technical incompatibilities (software, site structures, accounts, lists)
  - hosting and bandwidth issues
  - editorial policies and processes

On the technical side, the following questions would probably be important:
  - Could the MediaWiki software (http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net) be used
    by the IMC sites?
    (research: drawbacks/benefits, changes needed, development time, etc.)
  - Could all the IMC content be imported properly?

In short, it seems to me that if these two projects could join forces,
the end result would be more than just Wikinews and IMC separately.

regards,

Jama Poulsen [User:Walden]