Greetings to the mailing list!
A short while back, I thought that since Wikinews only goes back to November
2004, that is far from the kind of comprehensive current events archive we
want to be. Compare less than two years of archive to the New York Times's
history of hundreds of years. While in a hundred years Wikinews will look
far more comprehensive, NYT will look even -more- comprehensive.
In addition, I have access to databases containing news articles from the
New York Times, as well as other newspapers. I could use this to fill in the
gap -- create articles on events from before November 2004, as well as
during 2004 and 2005 when our coverage has been a bit spotty. Any of these
articles would go through a different process: while they would be part of
date categories, they would use {{supp develop}} in lieu of {{develop}} and
{{supp publish}} in lieu of {{publish}} (both tag the articles as part of
"Supplementary Wikinews" and put them into the No Publish and Supplementary
Wikinews categories). After the article is finished and tagged with {{supp
publish}}, it would spend a short amount of time to be looked over by
others, then protected as part of the archive.
I understand that the idea of Wikinews is that news stories are written
based on knowledge at the time, so that future generations can see what we
know and what we think. That's why I would aim to limit myself to using
verbatim scans/copies of newspapers I have access to -- I highly doubt those
get modified. I also understand that the databases may carry only American
newspapers -- unless someone knows where I may find foreign newspapers,
there's nothing I can do about it.
Any thoughts?