Wikinews:Great ideas

Wikinewsies are constantly coming up with great ideas to improve the site, resolve problems, and suggestions for how things can and/or could be done in the Water cooler. Some of the best of these are collected here, to give people an idea of projects which are available to help out on, or ideas they can pick up and run with on their own.

Video Wikinews
Camera phones are just the first step! In 2005, DV led the Broadcast project to develop the ability to create video news casts of Wikinews stories. The mantle was taken up in 2007 by the Video 2.0 project.

Audio Wikinews
 Audio Wikinews  

Mrmiscellanious, Amgine, and NGerda have been doing sporadic hosting of the show. The longest broadcasting streak was one week, by NGerda. Hopefully, the broadcasts will become more regular, as it takes hours to record a single segment.

Wikinews Print Edition
The WikiNews Print edition is an attempt at creating a daily print edition. It is designed to help bring new users in, by allowing people to print and distribute copies to those that would never otherwise hear about WikiNews.


 * CraigSpurrier, MrMiscellanious, Chiacomo, and anyone else I've missed have kept the print edition running with an unbroken record more than 6 months! - Amgine 04:45, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
 * How can I help? Jason Safoutin 19:42, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikinews Newsrooms
Wikinews Newsrooms could be Wikinews offices located around the country, with space donated by business owners. It would be a community newsroom where Wikinewsies can collaborate on articles, assist one another in finding media for articles, and print and distribute Wikinews Print Editions to their communities. Local offices could also be in charge of recording Audio Wikinews and Video Wikinews programs. At first, computers could be available at a "bring you own" policy, but as donations raise, we eventually might be able to buy computers. The goal of this project is to raise community awareness of Wikinews, create a physical meeting place for Wikinewsies, and to further increase the quality (and quantity) of Wikinews articles.

WikiNews Network (WNN)


Audio Wikinews has been producing short 5-minute audio files you can listen to, and there are not any currently any plans for a 24-hour news feed. WNN is just like any other news channel on TV, exept we cover world wide news. Most news channels are country/region specific and don't talk much about anything outside of that area, and also it will be broadcasted via Shoutcast, rather than recieved on TV. Also we show very little commercials, and most commercials are for Wikimedia or Wikimedia projects anyway. WNN will not be a 24/7 station, at least not right away. If you have any ideas for a show you can do, about an hour time block, you schedule in the commercials when you want, send an email to emailWNN@gmail.com if you're interested in advertising to help out WNN, or want to do a show on WNN.

RSS story development workflow
Automated RSS feeds to inform wikinews-developers of submitted stories, prepared stories, developing stories, etc. That is, pre-publication stage news feeds, to accelerate workflow. i've implemented a test of this at Proposed Workspace, and elaborated on it further at Water_cooler/proposals. Kevin Baastalk 01:24, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia's featured article template
Wikipedia uses a java script and a template to add stars to the interwiki links in the side bar when an article has been marked as a featured article on the project sister site. If other Wikinews projects have a featured article system in place, we should import this feature.


 * I proposed this on the water cooler, and no one really cared. see w:template:link FA for more info. Bawolff ☺☻[[image:smile.png]] 23:29, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Article discussion/Letters to the editors
Several people expressed an interest in creating a namespace/article tab where readers may discuss the news content separately. A larger number of community members opposed the idea, but it may be something to consider as new technology becomes available.

Some technical issues:


 * Multiple talk namespaces associated with a single main namespace article.
 * Creating an article tab

Some community issues:


 * Violates multiple element of the WN:NOT policy.
 * Concerns regarding Etiquette and policing these talk pages.