This email was prompted by a rant from Jason which I have heavily edited and
am still not particularly happy about. I have my very personal ideas about
what the blog should be like and his post does not fit with them.
First and foremost, I'm going to violate RFC 1855. If you don't know what
that is then go look it up. It should be required reading for every single
individual accessing the Internet.
DO NOT TREAT THE BLOG AS A SOAPBOX!
It is not a venue for vicious verbiage, nor a platform for caustic
criticism. Nothing done by third party sites should be reported on it; it is
for commenting in a thoughtful and considered manner on the mechanics of
working on Wikinews, on issues arising from articles on Wikinews, and issues
surrounding that. Digg? I don't care. I didn't spend hundreds of dollars to
give people a platform to diss them. If you want to judge Digg harshly, they
are simply a site that relies on crowdsourcing to get people to provide
their content for little work on their part so they can *sell adverts*.
There's a pretty diagram illustrating that somewhere on the Internet, it has
a box labeled "Website" surrounded by lots of little bubbles labeled
"sucker".
If you're going to post a new article on the blog, then ask yourself would a
respectable site like the BBC run your post? They have an Editors' blog too,
read it, see how they approach the issue, see what they consider acceptable
and *professional*.
Brian McNeil