[Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project

Tue Oct 12 21:31:00 UTC 2004

Delirium-
> One thing we already do somewhat is provide fairly good summaries of
> news-type events in Wikipedia proper.  For example, [[Hurricane Ivan]]
> was being updated minute-by-minute with information as it became
> available.  It'd be nice if we make sure that this still keeps
> happening---that is, that anything "encyclopedic" from Wikinews gets
> folded back into Wikipedia, preferably in real time so our Wikipedia
> articles on newsworthy subjects stay up-to-the-minute.

Yes, that will certainly happen, thanks to the FDL. However, in general,  
Wikinews articles will be much more detailed than what is appropriate for  
an encyclopedia article, and they will contain things like predictions and  
speculations by experts. In the hurricane example, we would write not just  
a brief timeline as in Wikipedia, but a detailed article about
- what the forecast of the hurricane path and strength for the next day is
  - according to different experts
- what preparations are being made by the local authorities (evacuations  
etc.)
- what the situation is like for the people living in the storm area (live  
wikireport)

Where Wikipedia would just summarize something like
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2004/dis/al092004.discus.067.shtml?
in one sentence, Wikinews might well reproduce (public domain?) the whole  
thing in order to give people as much useful "live" information as  
possible.

So the two projects are very different, and in many cases, I think the  
work of summarizing the Wikinews article will not be much different from  
the work of summarizing other sources on news.google.com.

In the long term, I would like to be able to label a certain portion of  
the article as a summary, either by saying "the first paragraph is always  
the summary", or by using something like <label name="summary">, and then  
being able to do

        {{Wikinews:Hurricane Ivan weakening (Sep 22 2004)#summary}}

i.e. to use cross-project transclusion to load this text into Wikipedia.  
Then the entire [[current events]] page on Wikipedia could be generated  
from Wikinews summaries.

> (PS - Aren't parentheses wonderful?)

(They have their uses..

Regards,
Erik)