Wikinews:Interview of the month

On 5 December 2005 a group of Wikinews reporters interviewed Jimmy Wales live in the International Wikinews IRC channel with an audience of Wikinews contributors, other Wikimedia Foundation participants, and others unrelated to the projects. It was a large success, and spun off articles in 6 languages as well as being sourced by other news articles.

There were, of course, immediate cries to do this sort of thing again, which is what this page is about: organizing a monthly interview with a news maker live in IRC. People who are interested in being notified of upcoming interviews are encouraged to list a link on the contact list.

Who?
Ideally, interview candidates will be people involved with current events, hopefully *very* current! The interview with Jimbo was set up the week before a news event happened which put Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation in the spotlight of mainstream media. That type of luck cannot be relied on, and we should focus on selecting and contacting news makers who will be a valuable interviewee no matter if they become a feature of the mainstream media or not.

Some suggested fields for news makers (by no means exhaustive):


 * Executives of large or pivotal corporations, non-governmental organizations, or governmental branches/departments.
 * Public figures, such as politician or entertainment figures.
 * Researchers/Scientists who have recently published articles with wide ranging implications.

The wikinews edition which is the dominant language for the individual interviewed will be in charge of actually moderating the interview.

When?
The exact when for each interview will, in part, be determined by the news maker's schedule. The goal would be to have the interview in the first half of the month, if possible the first week. The time of day should be convenient to the interviewee, realizing that some wikinews contributors will be available 24 hours a day.

Questions should be compiled prior to the actual interview, but might not all be used. It will be important to schedule interviews in advance so reporters can do the necessary research before the interview.

Each interviewee should be given a short period of time to speak on a subject of their choice, in addition to a one hour question and answer period, up to a half-hour.

Where?
The interviews will take place in the International Wikinews IRC channel. This may be accessed via web-browser with.

The goal is to produce opportunities for all Wikinews language editions to be involved in interviews, and produce articles about those interviews in many languages for a world-wide internet audience.

What?
The interviews will consist of an address by the interviewee, if they'd like, followed by a question and answer session from a moderator. It will be up to each moderator how they would like to set up the questions, but they should work with questions which are prepared before the interview as well as questions submitted to them during the interview by reporters present.

Realizing that a live interview can never be completely scripted, it would probably be best to plan on having only about half of the question time covered by prepared questions and the rest be raised during the interview.

May
Andrew Westphal project director of Stardust@home has accepted a request for an interview with Wikinews for May 2006.

We will be doing research and developing questions at Wikinews/Interview of the month/May 2006 Questions.

This months Interview will be taking place at: 11:00 a.m. Pacific, May 18, 2006 in the International Wikinews IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/wikinews).