[Foundation-l] Re: Swedish, Spanish, French Wikinews set up

Mon Jan 31 01:50:19 UTC 2005

Erik Moeller wrote:

>> However, setting up a wikinews the way you did it, without prior warning
>  
> This is untrue. After the creation of nl.wikinews.org, I wrote:
> 
> "If everything is OK, and the board is happy with this language being 
> set up, I will go ahead and create the other ones which have sufficient 
> community support. "
> 
> There were no objections.

I didn't see a reaction from the board to your announcement that 
nl.wikinews was set up. You seem to confuse not reacting with having no 
objections or "being happy".

The other thing: I don't have the impression that Anthere is speaking 
here from her board position, but - as notafish - as a member of the 
french community which seems to be not happy about the newly created 
wikinews. How much this holds true for the majority of contributors in 
french wikipedia I don't know, but it's certainly a thing worth 
considering before rushing ahead.

Anyway, french is created now so it makes no sense to complain about but 
let's not commit the same mistake again for the chinese wikinews. Here 
it certainly makes sense to hold a separate vote among the community of 
chinese wikipedians if they want a wikinews or if they consider the risk 
of chinese wikipedia getting blocked due to this too high.

The rules for new language editions were created with wikipedia in mind 
which means: starting a project in a language which isn't represented 
yet in a wikimedia project. However, the situation for wikinews is 
different: we have already wikipedia communities in most languages, with 
contributors who may or may not be willing to join a second project.

As maverick proposed, we should reconsider these rules for new projects 
like wikinews. From my experience as admin on the german wikinews you'll 
  need a small crew of experienced people who teach newbies about basic 
rules. I don't want to know how many copyright violations I deleted in 
the first days of german wikinews, apart from dealing with vandalism and 
POV contributions. The enthusiastic newbies who joined in the first days 
were pretty helpless against this and had to struggle enough to learn 
writing news.  Additionally, wikinews editions could also do very well 
with professional journalists accompanying the project, writing 
tutorials and helping people through the first steps.

My proposal for setting up new language editions of a project would be: 
  people who want to work on a new language edition should gather on 
meta-wiki and elect two known people as admins. Further, we should try 
to figure out if there is real interest or if people just signed the "I 
want a xx wikinews" and then never show up. This could be done by 
inviting people to a preparation meeting on the IRC channel, where they 
also could get to know each other.

Just compare the spanish and the dutch wikinews: At the moment I'm 
writing this mail, the spanish wikinews has seen exactly seven edits 
(three by a dutch user) while the dutch has already a nice main page and 
several news. If this continues, spanish wikinews will be just another 
wiki which has to be regularly controlled by external people for spam 
and vandalism.

greetings,
elian
PS: In the time between, please document your actions on
http://wp.wikidev.net/Server_admin_log
and make the developers happy by following their conventions.
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