I want to see the blog resurrected on Wikinewsie - and perhaps others added there too. You can pretty much forget us getting a WMF-provided blog of any particular sort until we prove such will clearly fit the remit laid out to justify 501(c) status. The Editors' Blog did not do too well for a variety of reasons. The scope was intended to be on the details of the news reporting process, yes with posts being single author and having a clear byline there is nothing wrong with opinion that would not meet NPOV. There is a problem with ranting anger that isn't cogently justified. A more technical blog, or one with a focus on recent meta-news might work. There certainly isn't much chance of us being able to make submissions to the official WMF tech blog. In this case, WordPress is more appropriate than wiki technology because there is little collaboration on the published item, and a need for a widely-known simple comment system. I set up Wikinewsie.org because, despite asking again and again, nobody would agree to give us @wikinews.org or even @en.wikinews.org email addresses. The rest is just because it'd be stupid not to have a web page matching the domain in the email addresses. At Wikimania in Alexandria, there were nods of agreement from Sue, Jay, and Michael when I said I would like the WMF to take over the domain and provide the hosting. Since then nothing, but it is clear from current discussions that Wikinews is not a remotely important project when prioritising the issues the WMF has to deal with. There is an open invitation for stuff on the strategy wiki, and I would quite like to put that up there. However, we have to be able to say what the one-off and continuing costs are. Realistically, we have to get the Wikinewsie site to a state where we could hand it over without requiring substantial up-front costs, or high ongoing ones. Those costs will fall on the WMF techies. We need to use open source applications that are believed to have been well tested, if not actually had their code audited. Where there is custom code, it should be as short as possible and simple enough to allow a speedy review or audit. So, the current real pain in the ass with Wikinewsie is maintaining the list of accredited users. It looks like the closed wiki on there with the Public: namespace is the best option for that. Then the number of people who can maintain the data is much bigger, and the task is less technical. If we change the wiki to the Vector skin and tweak it to look WMF-related, but noticeably enough different, that would be ideal. Then you need a Wordpress theme that matches this. What other glue do we need to hold the whole thing together? What open source tools would we replace Godaddy's email and calendar tools with? A last point is, can we integrate Wordpress, wiki, email, and calendar login a-la SUL? Can we do so with fine-grained enough control to give accredited reporters and admins access to the wiki, but not those who are only admins email? Do we have some sort of Wikinewsie super-bureaucrats who can say, yes, Bawolff gets permissions to go almost anywhere and change technical details, or kick off bug-fix updates. But not post to blog X because he isn't accredited. Then, is there any specific feature we need from these tools that they don't provide? Can we persuade someone to develop that? I can see a calendar for working on news reporting being very useful if anyone can propose an upcoming event be added, those proposals being vetted, then appearing on a public calendar. That could be far more useful than the current on-wiki mechanism to propose a story. Are there enough people interested in seeing this happen to work on it on-wiki and do some of the technical work? If so, I'll create a page, lay out what I think we should have, and invite others to do the same and comment on my ideas. Brian. _______________________________________________ Wikinews-l mailing list Wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l