On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 <de10...@gmail.com> wrote: > The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the > most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many > countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages > and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was > never able to capitalize on this. >
When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, French and Hungarian. At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can access both current news and a historical archive of news with verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be free-as-in-freedom are good too. This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the BBC...) [1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
