I'm no expert here, but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises. I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians, and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals, especially because, right now, it relies on them.
Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and secondary sources, Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it collects links about (not so recent) news. Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place. As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New York Times website, which is much more update. I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last a single day, but instead needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill an informative gap, because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different articles on the same subjects, but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them. This could be an interesting direction. Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia: in case of patent "recentism" (unfortunately, often catastrophic events) people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial facts on something that already happened. If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place where to write all that stuff. Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things have slowed down, relying on the Wikinews article. My 2cents, obviously. Aubrey 2011/9/13 Tom Morris <t...@tommorris.org>: > On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 <de10...@gmail.com> wrote: >> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the >> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many >> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages >> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was >> never able to capitalize on this. >> > > When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I > wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the > smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, > French and Hungarian. > > At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish > Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number > of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often > have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can > access both current news and a historical archive of news with > verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context > provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for > democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media > available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be > free-as-in-freedom are good too. > > This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less > availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, > yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the > BBC...) > > [1] > http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants > [2] > http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response > > -- > Tom Morris > <http://tommorris.org/> > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l