[Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?

Mon Dec 17 01:23:24 UTC 2007

On 17/12/2007, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
> +our goal is to spread this knowledge freely to all humanity. People
> knowing of our existence is a prerequisite to them using our
> knowledge.
> +We get attention, and hence donations
>
> Your point on immediatism is a problem for WP, but is the whole
> purpose of WN. If more contributors were aware of the split here, and
> tried to keep "breaking news" on WN, and then moved to WP after the
> story has settled down and the page been locked, then there would be
> less of a problem and more inter-project coordination. Breaking news
> simply is not, and should not be, the purview of Wikipedia.
> --Andrew Whitworth
> ******
> How many people are aware of this view?  There's an "in the news" template
> on Wikipedia's main page that links into the Wikipedia story.  Neither that
> template nor anything on the "2007 Pakistani state of emergency" article
> directs the reader to Wikinews.

It's an excellent point. I thought about it a few months ago and
considered proposing a new policy banning anything under a week old
from being included in Wikipedia articles (actually, it was a little
more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it). It would help
Wikinews, and would also reduce the number of articles which are a
succession of "As June 2006 ..." paragraphs. Current events are not
encyclopaedic and it's impossible to write a good encyclopaedia
article as soon as something happens, since all the required sources
haven't been written yet (you have a handful of newspaper articles
which you can simply rewrite and that's it). I ended up not proposing
it because I didn't think I was enthusiastic enough about it to
survive the torture of trying to get it approved. Anyone think it's
worth a shot?