Erik Moeller wrote:
1) 2-3 Wikimedia (not Wikipedia) regulars in that
language supporting it
2) certain key documents being created / translated on Meta (mission
statement, Wikinews-NPOV, FAQ, Main Page etc.)
I am not sure that 2-3 people is enough.
I'm not sure what you mean with "demonstrated
that the existing
Wikipedia community supports it". Would you like local polls for each
language? I'd personally not want to use that approach, because I'm
worried about it leading to a loss of coherence within the Wikimedia
community over time, just because of some localized statistical
fluctuations in such polls.
I'm not sure I follow. I think there's a much greater risk of loss of
coherence if we let 2-3 people make the decision rather than if we
track a broader consensus of the community with a localized poll.
Regardless of what approach we use, it will always be
difficult to
predict the success of a new language edition before it is set up. It
really depends on the passion and dedication of the handful of people
who start working on it. A single highly motivated volunteer can run a
very successful Wikinews edition all by himself.
I think this last bit is what is not true. Wikinews differs from
Wikipedia in that news is constantly changing, whereas encyclopedia
articles are timeless. If a single highly motivated volunteer writes
100 articles at a rate of 2 per day, then even if no one else joins,
those articles have permanent lasting value whenever more people do
come along. With an encyclopedia, laying down a base of work is
always valuable, if anyone helps or not.
With news, though, stories are stale after just a few days.
Therefore, a much higher number of participants than 1 is needed for a
successful wikinews. If only 2-3 people are involved, it is likely to
falter after a few weeks.
Look at
fr.wikinews.org for a demonstration of this. At the moment, the
top headline is for 15 Feb -- and it is now 3 Mar.
be deterred. That's why I think a policy based on
people doing work on
Meta first, rather than on some poll or vote, might lead to better results.
This is a very good idea, yes.
The problem with just saying "We'll be Beta
for two years" is that it's
a very top-down approach.
No, I didn't mean that exactly. It is my prediction that we will want
to be in beta for at least that long. I do think that some set of
criteria makes a lot of sense of course.
A lot of people have complained to me about Wikinews
being in Beta
and them not knowing what to do about it and who decides that and
why.
I think this can be clarified, and I think that the bar should be set
quite high *and* people should know that this is our method of deflecting
certain types of criticism, not a negative thing.
Google News is still in beta.
The idea is: if someone wants to write an article saying Wikinews is
not yet very good, we want to be able to respond: of course, we are
not claiming that it's a released product yet.
This would also necessarily mean that, for example,
the English Wikinews
might move out of Beta before the Bulgarian one, which I think is the
right thing to do.
Yep.
--Jimbo