[Foundation-l] Please REJECT the latin wikinews project.inmediatly

Sun Jun 22 21:56:50 UTC 2008

This is silly. The biggest Wikinews project is English, and we struggle. On
a good day, we have 10-20 articles, but the days where we have ten or less
outnumber those. Just how many competent Latin authors do we seriously think
we can muster? How many articles can they write *per day*? This is seriously
different from Wikipedia, you have a very short window of opportunity where
something is news; it just comes across as a vanity idea for those would-be
dilettantes who might contribute one or two articles a month. You need to
generate new content day-in, day-out, continually.

I've said it before, and it is effectively a project axiom now, "Facts don't
cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news".

Efforts would be better directed at working out how to get those guilty of
recentism on Wikipedia to work on Wikinews, and to getting Wikinews'
archiving managed such that the project's stories can be used as sources for
Wikipedia articles.

Simple English is a different kettle of fish, but Wikinews would
realistically only be provided as an educational project for improving
people's language skills. I'm afraid it seems we're a long way from
educators regularly using Wikimedia projects for such purposes. For a simple
English Wikinews to work those educators would have to be doing the
translation/simplification themselves, I think we're 5-10 years away from
wiki in general being sufficiently accepted to see such happen. I hope it
happens, and I see a great potential for simple English coverage of current
affairs being an educational tool. Yet, there is nothing stopping people
from contributing articles on the regular English project that are
restricted to the simple vocabulary and labelling them as such. I would have
no problem with less common words having links to wiktionary for a
definition, and if such were to improve the function of the project in
spreading knowledge I don't think anyone else would either.

Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ziko van Dijk
Sent: 22 June 2008 21:21
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Please REJECT the latin wikinews
project.inmediatly

I am not so happy about the rules for allowing new Wikipemia
projects... as Latin Wikipedia has proved to do very well (much better
than many languages with many native speakers), and as there are Latin
news e.g. at Finnish radio, I don't see a problem with allowing
Wikinews in Latin.
Ziko

2008/6/22 Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
> Jesse Plamondon-Willard wrote:
>> Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I've seen a lot of people in opposition to the current policy, and not
>>> too many in support of it.
>>>
>> I've seen a lot of people who would prefer we make some changes to the
>> policy (which is very common in any compromise), but not much
>> agreement on how to change it. Are you suggesting that we stop
>> processing requests for dead languages until we reach consensus on a
>> policy with which to do so? That leads to the same result as applying
>> the established policy.
>>
>>
> Am I wrong to just get more confused about this situation?  The function
> of any (sub-)committee is to recommend rather than to decide.  It can
> recommend that a project be started or not.  It can recommend criteria
> to guide such decisions.  This goes off the rails when those criteria
> are treated as set-in-stone rules.  Whether a language is dead is a fine
> criterion.  Whether a language has an ISO code is a fine criterion.  The
> presence of an adequate community for a project is a fine criterion.
> There are surely other fine criteria.  None should be absolutely
> determinative by itself.  The committee's recommendations should take
> all of these into account and not get overly upset when the community or
> the Board occasionally comes to a different conclusion.
>
> Ec
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde

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