User talk:Plenty

Welcome
Hi Plenty!

That was a great article you started... I've rarely laughed so hard. However, it clearly falls under the "Obvious hoax or spoof", so it was speedy deleted. It has been preserved, in the last version, on the Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense for posterity, in case you want to show your friends.

Thanks for your contribution! and welcome to the community - Amgine/talk 06:13, 20 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I'm glad someone enjoyed it. As I've described here, I actually hoped that despite its initial spoofy quality, it would get transformed by the community into something genuinely NPOV and publishable. (I like this version -- did you write that yourself or take it from a later, edited version of my original article that I never saw?) So, I was surprised to see you'd deleted it. If you can retrieve its history (and its discussion page) for posterity, please do! Plenty 21:34, 20 May 2005 (UTC)


 * The article in its condition at the BJAODN is where members of the community had brought it, foremost among them being bryce I believe. The article's history and discussion page are deleted, and for good reasons. However, Wikinews does have an undeletion guideline which you could follow up on, especially as a candidate for temporary undeletion.
 * Again, I haven't read with any specific depth this article, but there are a few things which strike me that you haven't considered in your arguments.
 * The vast majority of published news articles are taken from the wires. With the exception of a few large newspapers, most papers produce less than half-a-dozen original articles per day. For wikinews, even with the use of external sources on which to base articles, to rewrite as many as we do is amazing since absolutly no one gets anything out of it; not even byline recognition.
 * One of the primary benefits of Wikinews is the archives. Wikinews articles are supposed to be archived, protected, after two weeks. This is to preserve an historic record of what was known about an event at a given time. English Wikipedia has hundreds of links already to Wikinews articles, and this number will continue to grow as the archives develop into a useful collection of source material. Online news sources rarely or never offer free achive access. In this way we help with the verifiability of the 'pedia, just as we use the 'pedia as a way to add depth to our articles.
 * An area of interest on Wikinews is the support of local news. It is my opinion that this will become the primary niche for Wikinews, covering local events in a way only local people can. You will notice that Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA is heavily represented in the original reporting, because we have an active contributor in the region; we need two or three people like him to cover his town adequately. From such local coverage we can build a larger network which is able to manage international news simply because we will have reporters present.
 * Finally, we don't need to justify our existence. No one needs to read here, or contribute here, or anything else. The fact you feel we must only shows we don't meet *your* interests. And the only way to do so is if you start to cover the stories in the way you think they should be covered, and work with the community to expand that coverage. It's a community project, and will develop in the directions, and interests, of the community. Maybe it will grow into something you will respect. Maybe not.
 * Hope I haven't bored you with my essay; I seem to have gotten rather long-winded.


 * Not at all. All excellent points. I can see how, over time, if Wikinews develops several local reporters covering events in each city around the world, producing thousands of locally relevant stories a day, it could become a uniquely valuable resource. From that perspective, Wikinews is still in its infancy, and I should let it alone and give it time to mature.


 * I've watched with amazement as Wikipedia became something profoundly valuable in a short time, and it did not do that by copying information from previously existing encyclopedias, but mostly by people contributing about subjects they already personally knew about. So I was hoping Wikinews would become a similarly grass-roots kind of phenomenon that would do much more than just re-state, in perhaps a slightly more neutral manner, whatever the wire services are putting out. Maybe in a few more years, it will become just that.


 * I hadn't thought about the free archive aspect, and I would now agree that simply for that reason, "parroting" the wire stories is, while not of much interest to me as a reader, justified. (Incidentally, of course Wikinews doesn't have to justify itself, but I would assume that most Wikinews writers would like their efforts to be valued, so the question of justification is still important.) So, with that, I'll abandon my crusade for the hearts and minds of Wikinews reporters everywhere with an emphatic "nevermind" and I'll keep on hoping that Wikinews will continue to evolve into something better.


 * Thanks for the thoughtful dialogue! Plenty 00:45, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Regarding Wikipedia's early development, on the contrary, it *did* start off by largely copying other encyclopedias, or other online sources. In fact, *literally* copying in a few cases: Project Gutenberg had the 'A' volume of the 1911 Britannica (as public domain), and in Wikipedia's first year, I started literally cut and pasted them in. See Proposal for an Encyclopedian Recycling Endeavor. Work on this continued beyond just 'A' (see 1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica. Of course, this only represents a fraction of the total material in Wikipedia but it demonstrates that Wikipedia was not made from a blank sheet of paper, but heavily leveraged external work.  ;-)

For WikiNews, I would strongly suggest that you *NOT* "let it alone and give it time to mature". I was one of many in Wikipedia when it started up, but I think that the ideas I shared and the work I did played a role in helping it become more successful faster than it would, without my help. Sometimes you think, "Hey, I'm just one guy, what difference would it make for me to be involved," but in reality one person can have a big impact. I especially love new projects because your one person's worth of work can inspire ten other people to get involved; because of your work really early on in a project, you can help snowball it into something massive a few years along. I think I copied no more than about 20 articles, but I guess I primed the pump, because hundreds more have been added since then. It doesn't always happen that way (most online projects fail), but when it does happen it's something to be very proud of.

Plenty, you seem to have a strong passion for seeing original reporting in WikiNews. I doubt there's anyone here that won't think that's an excellent principle. You're exactly right that there isn't enough of it currently, though. It's entirely possible that on the path WikiNews is on currently, it may never develop much of a talent for original reporting. But this is exactly the type of thing where one passionate person could 'prime the pump' and give the whole project a major course adjustment. One guy doing original reporting right now, and demonstrating how to do it well, and working out good techniques, could result in original reporting becoming WikiNews' prime strength in a few years.

There's a lot of ways to get an online project to accept a new idea and to adopt it as a standard practice. The absolute *best* approach, that works most reliably, is to "lead by doing". You see this philosophy echoed in various open source projects, in mantras like, "Patch first, ask questions later", "Be bold in updating", "send in a patch", "pick up a shovel", etc. By putting the idea into practice, you achieve several things: First, you demonstrate just how serious you are and how much you believe in the idea. Second, the idea gets implemented, even if only on a small scale. Third, you give people something they can simply copy and reproduce (copying is so much easier than figuring things out yourself!) And fourth, your point can get proven in practice, which is much more convincing than proving it in concept.

Look at any wildly successful open source project and I'll bet you see some variation of the above practice in play. ;-)

Plenty, give some thought to ways you could 'prime the pump' for original reporting. Make it seem very cool and interesting, show that it's fun to do, and make it easy to imitate, and I bet others will follow along and do similar. BryceHarrington 20:09, 21 May 2005 (UTC)