2009/11/5 Peter Coombe <thewub.w...@googlemail.com>: > Wikinews has it's problems, and is often overshadowed by it's bigger > brother Wikipedia. But it certainly hasn't failed. There's a > respectable amount of content being produced, including original > reporting that just would not fit on Wikipedia. Articles are picked up > by Google News (at least, they will be again once a bug is fixed). And > there is a fairly small but dedicated community.
Mmm. It's fair to say that Wikinews has not exploded massively, or become a first-rank household-name service like Wikipedia has. It'd be great if it did, of course, but not doing so isn't a sign of failure! We did astonishingly, staggeringly, unbelievably, improbably well with Wikipedia. Failing to replicate that is to be expected; it's unlikely we could deliberately manage such a success without a shedload of good luck. "It's got a wiki in it" isn't a magic spell, after all. Wikinews is, as Pete says, flourishing quietly; it has a community, it has readers - though I'd be interested to see figures - and it is making steps in the outside world, reaching people and making a niche independently of its "big sibling" Wikipedia. It's not become a top-ten website, it's not a household name, but then, neither are the other sites working in this field. The readership of the English Wikinews is 8m pageviews/month; this is only about 50% less than the English Wikiquote or Wikisource, both quite stable and regarded projects. There's certainly a core of people out there who read it, and who are presumably satisfied enough to keep doing so. The authors enjoy writing it; the readers continue to, well, continue to read it. Administratively and technically, it's a small cost; from a volunteer perspective, the loss to the other projects of people who might be working on them is offset by the fact that there's a definite social benefit to keeping multiple projects so that people can change what they're working on for a whle rather than burn out and leave entirely. And, of course, people who actively want to write journalism have somewhere to do it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
