[Foundation-l] Formal request: Wikinews project

Sun Oct 10 08:30:02 UTC 2004

Angela wrote:

>On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:45:46 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>Given that on en: at least, Current Events is fairly mediocre in
>>quality, is there a need for an entirely separate site?  Why not work to
>>make [[en:Current Events]] a truly good summary of current news, and
>>once that happens, expand to original reporting?
>>    
>>
>
>Current Events is getting an awful lot of hits for something
>supposedly "mediocre". After Hurricane Ivan and the Main Page, it was
>the most visited page last month. [[Current events]] is also the most
>edited page on the English Wikipedia. Of the 20 most edited pages
>across all Wikimedia projects, the current events page, and its
>equivalent in other languages, shows up four times. This demonstrates
>a huge interest in not only reading the page, but also in
>collaborating in its creation. I believe this level of interest
>demonstrates that Wikinews will be a success.
>  
>
"Mediocre" wasn't a judgment on its popularity, but on its quality.  If 
you look at it, news coverage is spotty at best.  The big stories are 
covered, which I'd imagine contributes to the popularity (as 95% of 
people are looking for the top 3% of stories).  But its breadth is not 
very good at all, and that could certainly be much expanded without a 
separate site.  It's also not very much edited, really.  The stat that 
it's one of the 20 most edited pages is simply because it's a long 
on-going catalog of current events.  But each day's current events are 
edited by a small handful of people, and they generally cover only what 
that handful of people happen to think is important.  There's certainly 
not a group of even 20 people editing the page on a daily basis.

-Mark