[Wikinews-l] [Fwd: Re: [Foundation-l] the features...]

Wed Jul 6 10:39:01 UTC 2005

I'm very pleased that the technical solution I suggested and helped
develop with Ilya has been implemented on Wikinews. The fact that it
had been discussed and was in development before you changed the main
page should, however,  be mentioned Erik. Another is that it might not
now be in existence if I had not written a crude implementation this
afternoon and given it to Ilya.

> I put the inputbox on the Main Page to demonstrate it.

When has it been okay to experiment on the main page of a live site
without so much as an explanation to the regular contributors to that
site?

I'm not opposed to the inputbox extension in and of itself; it's a
slick piece of code which answers a need often expressed. I do not
think it is appropriate to use a complex nested template as it is
currently implemented, but that could be resolved by the community.

> Wikipedia has no such dependencies. I follow a link and I start
> writing. If my article is not perfect, that's fine, because it's
> still linked from the right places. People can see it. People will
> eventually fix it for me. In general, there's less things to know,
> and less things that can go wrong.

This was the justification for the use of the manual list in addition
to the automated list, until the additional functionality was coded. I
used nearly the same words, in fact.

The governance issues are not the basic reason for the Open English
proposal (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Start_a_new_edition)

There are currently 5 people supporting the creation of an Open
English edition of Wikinews, which is obviously not entirely due to
the recent differences regarding the DPL. Like any community at
en.wikinews there are different opinions as to what the goals of the
project may be, and some members of the community feel it is not going
someplace they wish to continue to support. But we continue to support
the larger goals of Wikinews, creating site where any human can
contribute news, valuable in its own right, with an open
decision-making process. And we would rather not leave the project, so
an alternative edition which serves different goals would give us the
opportunity to contribute without exacerbating strained working
relationships.

Amgine