User:Vanished user adhmfdfmykrdyr/Why I love Wikinews 2

One of the reasons I love English Wikinews is it allows people to do original reporting, and it honors old school journalism traditions. These values include neutrality, fact based, absent opinion and all the information is verifiable. These are keys to the community, and one of the main reasons why English Wikinews has started again to gain credibility inside its own community is because we are putting a lot of emphasis on this, and using the appeal of original reporting as a way of attracting new contributors.

Well meaning outsiders are often keen to offer us advice on how to increase participation and content output. This advice has included advice such as making English Wikinews a host for non-profit press releases. It has also included the idea that we should include articles from compatible licensed news sources. The thinking is that the existence of this material will encourage people to contribute their own work and take pressure off our own systems.

I love Wikinews because all our information is verifiable and neutral. All opinions are supposed to be ascribed to the source. This needs to be done before an article ever is published. It contrasts starkly with English Wikipedia, where articles may be unsourced for years, and where opinions are not attributed to sources directly in the text. Could you picture English Wikipedia if every unsourced statement was removed from the project, and every fact had to be checked against publicly available sources? English Wikinews has a reputation for accuracy because of the nature of our review process. And when we get things wrong because we made an error, we issue corrections. Can you picture that on English Wikipedia? Finding a factual error or a neutral point of view error, putting a box on the top and admitting that as a project, Wikipedia's review process was not perfect? I do not think so. The problem with external news sources and press releases is they are not required to adhere to our review process. It is unlikely the projects would be willing to have their reporters provide material to verify all the facts they present. It is unlikely those news sources would adhere to our neutrality policies. Can you picture going to a non-profit and telling them "Your press release is non-neutral and we are not able to verify the facts presented. Please fix these problems before we publish your press release."? That runs counter to the whole purpose of a press release. These ideas are interesting, but in an effort for well meaning outsiders to fix the problem, they run completely afoul of policies, of neutrality, etc. It is disheartening to the current community to be told by people with zero investment in understanding and contributing to out community that we should violate journalistic principles. This advice is damaging for project recruitment and retention, by suggesting our policies regarding verifiability, neutrality, copyright infringement prevention, complying with the style guide, guidelines core to our project, are not worth while.

I appreciate well meaning advice for how to improve editor recruitment and retention. I think the idea that we should include external content with a compatible licence as a way to increase editor participation is interesting. I would love to see a successful case study. I can think of two Wikinews projects off hand that allow this content. One of these projects consistently produces the most content of any Wikinews project. The problem is these projects do not appear to have succeeded in recruiting and retaining communities, nor in creating a reputation for news excellence. Before anyone else goes further with this well meaning advice, it would be great for these voices to provide English Wikinews with a case study for success, where introducing compatible licensed material that is non-congruent with the style guide, neutrality guidelines and verifiability guidelines has resulted in increased editor participation and editor retention. This does not feel like an unreasonable request, given the case studies that prove just the opposite inside the movement. Perhaps the first such case study could be done on English Wikipedia. There is plenty of freely licensed content that could be imported in bulk and then permanently locked to prevent others from editing.

What I love about English Wikinews cannot be fixed by violating the core policies of the project. People would not ask that of English Wikipedia and people should not ask that of us. Our community should be encouraged to develop solutions from within. Luckily, the Wikimedia movement offers us that ability and, as a community, we are taking the first steps towards researching and implementing these solutions.


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