[Foundation-l] Wikinews radio

Mon Jun 13 05:57:33 UTC 2005

I am posting this to foundation-l and wikitech-l, because there is both 
a technical and a policy aspect here.

A small but growing group of Wikinews contributors is actively making 
audio recordings of Wikinews stories. This effort is coordinated here:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews

The files are uploaded to the Commons in Ogg Vorbis format. Now, two 
members of this group have started to also produce a streamed version of 
this, which is broadcast at specific times -- effectively Internet 
radio. This could grow into a real independent wikiradio project which 
perhaps could encompass more than just news. The usefulness of realtime 
broadcasting for news should be obvious.

The current Wikinews page is at:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:WikiNews_Network

Now, here is our dilemma:

Streaming audio in realtime requires special software. WNN currently 
uses ShoutCast, which is not free/open source software. It is also not 
hosted on Wikimedia's servers, but on the server of one of our 
contributors. (We have the same issue with the print edition, but I'll 
try to resolve this separately.)

Do we want to run this on our own servers? If so, there is a free 
software implementation called Icecast. Would it be possible to securely 
set up an Icecast server for this purpose on our hardware?

If we don't want to run it on our servers, should we allow it to be 
called "Wikinews Network", or should it use a different name?

Should we set any specific limits for the project's scope beyond NPOV, 
or should we let it experiment freely with the format for the time 
being? (There was some talk about ads on the program, but I made it 
clear that this was absolutely impossible.) As for NPOV, a wiki-radio 
project might want to broadcast news *about* the wiki community; do 
these have to strictly adhere to NPOV (the German Wikipedia:Kurier, for 
example, does not)?

Best,

Erik