Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-07-10/Op-ed

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Past proposal

In 2012, the main author of this Signpost article made a proposal for closing Wikinews, which ended up rejected. --LFS (talk) 09:39, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The official criteria for closing WMF projects, to which that proposal went up against, are very narrow. --LukeSurl^{t c} 10:34, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also relevant, the March 2013 proposal to close Wikinews in all languages. --LukeSurl^{t c} 10:39, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A project done badly enough, while being promoted too much, can put Wikimedia projects as a whole into disrepute. However, I did not see anything on the level of misinformation, fringe theory promotion, and bias that I found in 2012 (Paragraph 2 in the section "My Problem" in that closure proposal) and, as such, felt no need to link to the much harsher criticism it deserved at the time, nor to advocate for it to be immediately shuttered. Should it become that bad again, though, the issue should probably be revisited - but for now, I think it's better to just stop trying to actively promote it here, as has been happening.

Further, LukeSurl, if anything, makes closing a project sound easier than it is. One requirement is that you notify the project in question prominently, and they can use sitenotice, make banners, etc. to send the people on the project - e.g. people who almost certainly support it - to the discussion. As such, the odds are stacked very, very strongly in the project's favour. But that's not really anything to do with the subject at hand.

Had I found problems on the levels of the ones I found in 2012, then I would have advocated shuttering it. I did not, and so chose to simply point out the issues with Wikinews now, not refight battles, however justified at the time, from then.

If you really want my conclusion on what should be done with Wikinews? I think it should simply get no particular special treatment here. We've removed some prominent links; it may be worth reevaluating whether Wikilinks in articles to Wikinews should be removed (it's not really a reliable source by our definitions, and the links seem to be solely down to it being a sister project - it's debatable, anyway), but I don't see that as particularly pressing.

How Wikipedia should treat Wikinews is my focus here. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 20:31, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Benefit

I buy your premise that it has been mostly unsuccessful in fulfilling its remit, but is there any real benefit to closing it? Gigs (talk) 13:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. What benefit is there in outlawing and closing down a project which has only a few active contributors? If you want to pay a staff of reporters and editors, then you can reasonably demand that they put out a daily news summary covering all the top stories. I check Google News every day for that purpose, if I do not manage to see the news on TV,hear it on the radio or read a major newspaper somewhere. If the few editors who spend their time on the project started using it to spread hoaxes, to promote their companies, to spread propaganda, or to attack their enemies, then i would call for shutting it down. The complaints in this opinion piece of not all important world news getting covered, and no updates on some days, might be answered if six more volunteers out of the hundreds of thousands who sometimes edit Wikipedia decided to help with news coverage. Journalism schools turn out thousands of graduates a year. This seems like a good outlet for would be news editors.Volunteer projects often wax and wane. Has there been a time in the past when there were more than 6 active participants in the project? I see no raging need to close down a well-intentioned and potentially beneficial project which is presently carried by too few volunteers. In my community there is a soup kitchen to feed the needy, but it needs more volunteers, so it is not perfect. There is a community band, which puts on concerts of classical and popular music and marches. They don't have enough volunteers playing clarinet and saxophone. There's a model railroad club which meets to operate a big layout of trains, but they are getting really old and sometimes fewer people than desirable show up. There's a Barbershop Harmony group, but the average age is about 75 and there are not enough tenors. Should we shut them all down and not let the volunteers do what they enjoy, because it is not our cup of tea so we don't want to help, and there are not enough people there to carry it off at our own personal high standard? Edison (talk) 14:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Realistically Wikinews wouldn't be shut down, but rather forked off from the WMF into a independent entity. In 2011 a fork, OpenGlobe, was created, but this withered away without the association of Wikipedia.

The question is, is the failure of Wikinews significantly problematic to the rest of Wikimedia to warrant this? As far as I am aware the cost of Wikinews in terms of the WMF's technical and paid-staff resources is quite negligible, so that's not a problem. The bigger concern is whether the association of the WMF with Wikinews results in an appreciable reputation cost for the successful projects.

The two Wikinews link removals discussed above stem from portions of the Wikipedia community not wanting to be associated with Wikinews, the links were determined to be unhelpful for readers as they lead them to an incomplete and low-quality site. The next question will probably be the use of Template:Wikinews and associated templates, which give prominent links to Wikinews in articles.

It seems apparent to me that Wikinews survives in the state it does not on its own merits, but because it is associated with the fantastically successful Wikipedia project. Here's the issue: are the link removals discussed above the beginning of a process whereby the Wikipedia community slowly cuts that lifeline? --LukeSurl^{t c} 15:17, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As the person who opened the RFC on removing the link from the main page, I would say I do feel it is a failed project, but I don't see why that means it should be forced to shut down. I don't use it as a source for news because there are so many other websites out there that have much better, up to date content and are just as free as wikinews. But it doesn't keep me awake at night knowing that a small "walled garden" of users prefer to spend their time on a project that doesn't really work. Beeblebrox (talk) 15:41, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I never actually called for it to be shuttered in the article, but see response one section above for reasons why a project might need to be shut down. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 20:48, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@LukeSurl, I don't think Wikinews would be sustainable away from the Foundation. OpenGlobe failed for several reasons, but a key factor was an inability to cover day-to-day expenses. Wikinews, in its current condition, would likely face similar financial challenges, adding another burden to the userbase on top of the existing pressure to keep producing news. They would probably need some fundraising campaign a la Kickstarter. Reader donations would not suffice.
That being said, I am not enthusiastic to see Wikinews close. Many of the non-English language editions are actually doing respectably (Russian Vikinovosti in particular), so it should, theoretically, be possible for en.wn to stage some kind of comeback. But for that to happen, the current structure needs to change markedly, with an acknowledgment from the local community that the current setup has not been conducive to growth. Thus far, such has not been forthcoming. Tempodivalse [talk] 23:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sofixit

{{sofixit}} — Feel free to submit an article. I'm happy to review articles from new contributors. —Tom Morris (talk) 14:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No-one has the right to tell anyone else that they have to work for them. So fix it does not apply when you're trying to force people to work for you for days. I loathe the "So fix it" mentality, when taken away from its original point: to encourage people to, say, stop spending just as much time pointing out typos as you would to fix them. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 16:07, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bigno! Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:01, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One wikinews article wouldn't fix Wikinews. It'd need about 5 a day to be even marginally relevant. and I would argue that Wikis aren't really particularly suited for dealing with content that goes out of date very quickly, since there's far less time for collaboration. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 17:43, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Vanity project

These are interesting facts thanks for bringing them up. I would vote for Wikinews closure if I knew it had come up, based on this. While you're at it, Wikisource has degraded into a technobueracrcy that is unfriendly to all but the most determined and dedicated user able to muster the time and energy to learn and implement an arcane system that is frankly hard work and not very fun. And they are extremely conservative in outlook squelching attempts to do things like annotations (last I checked). This is what happens when you have a small rural town run by a few obsessed users, and not a city like Wikipedia. These smaller projects need freedom to experiment and encouragement of users who want to try different things because one never knows where it may lead in building up interest in the project. The goal of these projects should be number of editors and edits (and page views), not some hardline preset ideological mandate that may or may not be what actually works in terms of encouraging users to contribute. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 15:20, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is drifting a little off topic but, if anything, Wikisource is at least a significant commuter town with decent transport links within this analogy. It's one of the larger WMF projects, even if not on the same order of magnitude as it's big sister. I'm a Wikisource admin and prefer that project to 'Pedia, so I'm biased, but "an arcane system that is frankly hard work and not very fun" is a pretty subjective statement regardless. Proofreading isn't especially hard and I, and others, do find it fun. Proofreading might be a little more complicated than editing here but not by much and we've tried to make things less arcane for visiting Wikipedians.
Regarding a specific point, Wikisource actually had an RfC about annotations (and similar stuff) recently. I even left you a message about it. I still need to sort out the policy page a bit, to be fair, but we're working on it. Annotations are going to be limited in the future and we might ask Wikibooks to provide a home for some of the existing annotated works but this is due to the project's scope and aims (which are not the same as Wikipedias', or Wikibooks' obviously). Wikisource's goal is to make all literature open to all people; that's our part of allowing people to "freely share in the sum of all knowledge". This means faithfully reproducing works, and some annotations can undermine that by altering either the original text or the reading of it. Even a simple wikilink can draw attention to a specific word and potentially influence the reading of the whole peice. We have (now) agreed that some annotations are OK (there was strong support to keep wikilinks FYI) but a significantly annotated and amended work is more within the scope of Wikibooks than Wikisource.
Hopefully this will forestall a series of Op Eds attacking every sister project in turn. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:47, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What is demonstrated here is that if anything is a vanity project, it is the Signpost. A tiny group use it as a soapbox for personal vendettas. Let's close this embarrassment down. Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:24, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

On the contrary, Adam's position is well supported (and justified by hard data). A concern about the continuing misuse of resources is not a "personal vendetta". The opinions of active Wikimedians are important, they are not "soapboxes". If Adam "failed" in any respect, it is in offering a good solution to the problem. I believe that the duties and responsibilities of Wikinews are best met by the Wikipedia community who are already performing these tasks in the framework of current events. Even if our editors are constrained by WP:NOR, which prevents them from publishing original reports, we already duplicate many efforts of Wikinews in our news coverage. Wikimedia, whether you choose to accept or recognize it, is a new media organization, and as such, can best perform the tasks of Wikinews within the parameters of our current policies and guidelines. While there is wide agreement that Wikinews doesn't work, Wikipedia can take the failure of its sister project as an opportunity to become an educational media organization in practice, rather than in name only. Viriditas (talk) 23:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Statistics

For context, statistics for all the Wikinews projects and a summary of those for the English Wikinews. --LukeSurl^{t c} 15:21, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One caveat about those: In the second, "Articles" does not refer to successful news articles, in fact, it's giving a number about 2-3 times the count of articles actually published for the last few months; I think it might be including talk or some other form of discussion page. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 20:20, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Both are crap

Is Wikinews a disaster? Yes. Is Wikipedia's In The News section any better? No. When you peek behing the curtain and see how items are selected for posting, you soon realise it's a total basket case. Despite the name, it doesn't simply select items based on the fact they are in the news that day (check your local provider to see how much doesn't make it). But what criteria it does use to select items? It's a complete mystery. There is no logic to it at all, maybe because people can't even seem to agree on what the hell the section is for. Take a look at the recent suggestions, you can see people claiming that the first human powered helicopter is worthy of posting, but the first landing of a drone on a carrier is not. What the hell is that based on, exactly? Further down the page there are some utter retards opposing the posting of the British Lions rugby tour result because it was just an exhibition tournament, and they appear to have succesfully torpedoed that suggestion even thought it's totall bullshit, and in spite of the fact the last test result in 2009 was posted! It doesn't matter how far you go back either, you find examples of utter stupidity on a daily basis at ITN. It also seems to be the only place on Wikipedia where you can get away with being a total asshole too, which possibly explains why so few people are active there (the same problem applied to Wikinews, at least as far as Brian is concerned). In The News is just as bonkers and idiotic as Wikinews ever was. Neither should be anywhere near the Main Page. Mission Twelve (talk) 18:35, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]