User:Lyellin~enwikinews/Thoughts

I'm using this to organize some of my thoughts on Wikinews, as it continues to grow and change.

Strengths
One thing that we need to emphasize is that we do have strengths. Even by just summarizing articles from AP, reuters, wherever, we can become a central repository for the information. Beyond that, we can interwiki link to wikipedia. This CANNOT be overlooked. The ability to do that means we can provide easy background information, helping readers who have no idea about a subject to have a broader understanding.

Frustrations
Mostly these are things that I know shouldn't bother me, and wiki projects should be used to. Unfortunetly, this is happening more and more from the WP community, and that bothers me. This is a new, baby project. The continued "doubting of it's viability" among other things, is just annoying. I really am getting tired of continual posts by WP editors, who should be used to the idea of a ever-growing and adapting out of the mainstream project, not giving WN a chance.

Quality
Quality, Quality, Quality. We've seen that we won't struggle for actual articles on the wiki- we tend to have several new articles made every day, of varying degrees of quality. The issue becomes one of stagnation, as articles are written and forgotten, lost in Development and Review tagland and never brought into "published" stages.

We need to combat that, but the answer is not to remove all structure and allow for mad editing throughout the board. Due to the early stages of the project, we just don't have enough editors and policers to ensure that badly written articles, vandalism, or anything else for that matter, is removed from the highly visibile portions of this site quickly enough. We need to have a loose (emphasis on loose) review structure in place, and encourage the use of it. To this end, we need to be thinking along the lines of a weekly, or twice monthly news magazine model, and not a daily newsource. If we can admit we just don't have the resources to be that quick in releasing articles, we give ourselves the leeway to move forward.

This doesn't preclude breaking news articles, but we need to have a system in place to get them out quickly to the main page. Perhaps a breaking news section, unlike the digest, that is monitered more closely. Who decides what can be considered breaking news?

So, goals. Encourage use of review/etc, in the loose form being talked about now. Reviewed articles can then be added to the Digest, which could be sent out to an e-mail list of some sort that people signed up for (we need to create this mechanism). Also it could be possible to feature the Digest on the main page, with weather and "in Dev" articles as well. This could replace the current format of adding any article at all to the main page. The advantage here is that we are showing the world a face which has passed some sort of standard, and begins to have substance.

Community
We need to build community, any way we can. Many of our problems will at least partially be solved by increased participation. We are currently stagnating a bit, so if we can increased participation, we get a few things.


 * 1) More people working on editing articles, hopefully.
 * 2) Perhaps establishing communities like the WikiProjects on WP (see Wikibureaus, below).

How do we go about this....
 * 1) More Advertising on wikimedia projects
 * 2) We need to re-do the main page, make it more attractive, and decided on what kind of things we want on there.

Goals-Long Term
Long term goals, which may take awhile.
 * 1) Get enough contributors and editors/reviewers to get to a daily level.
 * 2) Figure out a policy for allowing opinion articles. Where do they go? Who can do them? What process? Editorials?
 * 3) Figure out a policy for investigative or original reporting.
 * 4) Establish a system for Bureaus to feed into larger Bureaus.

Things we need to accept:
 * 1) We will not have full or even 1/3 comprehensive coverage for a very long time.
 * 2) Processes will be in flux if not forever, for awhile. Bear with us.
 * 3) Some review will be nessecary-a full blown wiki system may work, or may not, we're still playing with everything. Be aware of that.

Original Reporting
This is perhaps the biggest issue facing us, and one that is central to a lot of things that wikinews could or could not be doing. Basically, we have a battle against the wiki principals, which include NPOV, allowing anyone to edit anything versus the idea of having editorials and reporter levels, perhaps of trusted reporters, who would be able to write outside the POV rules in some way.

I like how the idea that de has been done, at least, from the bit I can understand from my bad translations in my head. Each person has to request being credited, be approved on the page, and leave contact info for the reporter. We'd also need a system to remove crediting as well. I'd also like to see each one be targeted for a specific area, if possible.

Bureaus
Just like WP has Wikiprojects, I propose the idea of having a WikiBureau system. For instance, we could have a WikiBureau:Indiana, where wikinews reports from the area work together to bring that section as up to date as possible. Why? Because not only does quality mean quality of articles, but quality of sections. To have a great Indiana section would then feed to US, then North America, then world, with perhaps a system of featured articles to see what gets to the largest digest. We could then, when we are much larger, include Bureau specific digests.

Questions I'm unsure of:
 * 1) Where would these go? Same page as the main page? Seperate bureau page? Main page talk page?
 * 2) Do we need them? I think we do- organization is always a good thing.
 * 3) Possible example?

Digests
In addition to the idea of Bureaus, I'm beginning to favor the idea of a digest for each Bureau, where the articlse that the Bureau works on can be put, in a central location, and then that digest can be the "product" of the Bureau. It was still require posting the links on the appropiate main pages, but the Digest would be a good "product" for the wiki to have, perhaps as a mailing list system weekly

What would be needed?
 * 1) Ability to easily move articles to a central digest. This is related to Eloquence's view that we need to have an automatic system to get articles to main pages by using categories.
 * 2) Ability to set up mailing lists through the mediawiki software for specific purposes.

Reference attribution
After discussion in the water cooler, mostly with Karim and Tomos, the idea of being able to attribute references and their verifibility seems like a really good idea. Karim suggusted using some sort of template to differentiate. We'd need to see if it's possible to do it that way- or to have a master page of sources that we count as good, and then only tag the ones we can't be sure of? Perhaps the references page could be that master page?