Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-25/News and notes

Sue Gardner leaving
Sue Gardner has done a lot of great work from what I have read over the years.

I think this comment of hers merits a lot of thought: "a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens". It is happening on Wikipedia too. The main problem in my opinion is the walled garden at Meta-Wiki.

Please move Meta-Wiki to the Wikimedia Commons. The Commons is the place far more people go to and watchlist. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:11, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * that's an interesting definition of walled garden. Significantly different from mine (not making any comment for or against moving meta, just saying that seems to be totally unrelated to a "walled gatden") Bawolff (talk) 04:22, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I linked to the root definition of walled garden. There is a link at the top of that article to the technology definition: walled garden (technology). I was intrigued by the root definition combined with the technology definition. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:09, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Mobile has been my concern the past year, especially since I have seen how frustrating it is to edit Wikipedia on an iPad or Android phone. When I read "Walled-garden" I thought immediately of iOS and my next thought was of the late Steve Jobs and his decision to move production from the US to Asia and how the early ideals of the internet seem to be lost. Jane (talk) 08:09, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I think the Wikimedia board and technical staff need to fix so many things. People have been complaining for years about some technical problems, but some of them never seem to get solved. Every little hindrance makes Wikipedia more of a walled garden. People have many places they can go edit nowadays besides Wikipedia. The number of active editors on English Wikipedia has been declining since 2007. So has the total number of edits each month by all editors (with some exceptions). --Timeshifter (talk) 10:04, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * p.s. Sue has done a wonderful job bringing the wmf to where it is today. Thank you sue for all you have done over the years. Bawolff (talk) 04:22, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I am looking forward to hearing about next steps, best wishes! FYI, the article's link to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_Program is no longer active and I believe should point to http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grantbow (talk • contribs) 15:57, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

WikiNews

 * Fantastic that one of the most vocal supporters of an ongoing proposal of dubious importance (rather minor if one looks e.g. at the number of supporters compared to other similar proposals in the same area) also decides, as Signpost author, to write on it about the matter. :) --Nemo 22:32, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, I'm the one who decided to cover and write about it, and the topic idea was sent to me by by a different person. We agreed that Tony wouldn't even copyedit the piece off-wiki, so that any changes he made would be transparent. Tony is listed as an author because he wrote the bulk of the Gardner story. :-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 22:36, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * It's still IMHO a COI that the editorial board (or however one may call it in English) as a whole has, and that should have added some additional care to the selection of the topic. I don't see any compelling reason to include this piece of information. How many open proposed closures with more supporters are there right now? 3 out of 4 open, as far as I can see. How many of the Proposals_for_closing_projects you covered? None? --Nemo 12:20, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I disagree, and I apologize for deciding that the possible closure of the Amharic Wikiquote, Old English Wikibooks, and Uzbek Wikibooks were not worth main stories. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 12:35, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * What are the criteria for such decision? What about the now-closed ones? --Nemo 19:36, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * There are no defined criteria; it varies from week to week based on the developments we have available to cover, and what we have covered recently. With little we wanted to cover this week, I chose to cover Wikinews and wrote up a good portion of the story seen here ... and then Sue Gardner announced that she would leave the WMF in roughly six months. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 19:59, 29 March 2013 (UTC)


 * The Wikinews piece was well written and thought-provoking. Well done by the writers! AGK  [•] 23:48, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Resolute 04:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I think WikiNews could work for Wikicomunity as a central of what is going on just like signpost which includes news from other sister project but is held inside wikipedia. I'm not sure if meta is the right place to such information but wikinews could be used perfectly (IMHO) to this missicn: A central mission of what is going on inside wiki comuunity in all projects. About arguments I read here, I agree that news don't grow over time such kind of fails about the wiki process. Regards!OTAVIO1981 (talk) 16:15, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Serbian Wikinews

 * Regarding Serbian Wikinews, a comment by Liliana on meta: "Note that Serbian Wikinews simply copies all articles from the Voice of America's Serbian homepage, as far as I know. That is of course completely inappropriate given that the VoA has a strong pro-American bias." Is this true? Serbian Wikinews, Voice of America Serbia ("All text, audio, and video material produced exclusively by the Voice of America is public domain."). --Atlasowa (talk) 10:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Signpost journalistic standards on display
Wonderful! It is fantastic to see that the Signpost bothered for non-neutral reporting, where verifiability is not even on the agenda. Well, despite one or two of the contributors to the signpost obvious vendetta against the project (because they could never get their work published on Wikinews because they wouldn't know neutral and verifiable if it reached over and bit them in the ass), it is extremely highly unlikely that the Foundation will close the project. Let's see the Signpost editors try to meet Wikinews standards for reporting in their next update. (hint: it will never happen.) --LauraHale (talk) 01:54, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Hello! I would like to point you to the post above, where I clearly delineated who wrote the Wikinews story (me) and how we dealt with the COI issue. I'm sure you realize that the Signpost is not going to avoid a topic simply because one of its reporters has a COI. That's why we have multiple writers. As for the rest of your statement, if you have specific and substantive issues with this article, I encourage you to raise them. Please note, though, that we do not have the same standards as Wikinews, so I can't address that. Last, I would love to have our readers weigh in here. We appreciate reader feedback and we do try to take it into account in future editions. Regards, Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 02:10, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * It may be useful to add separate bylines for each section. Resolute 04:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback. We are debating about putting parenthetical notes after author names in cases of COI&mdash;both real or percieved&mdash;via email, actually, so that we can keep the current format while addressing the concerns raised there. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 12:35, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Just to make it very clear
To Nemo and Laura Hale, yes, I did suggest specifying the authorships, but this might have been lost in the hefty last-minute job of editing that was left to Ed, who like other Signpost journalists is exceptionally busy at the moment. Now that I've returned from a brief trip, with very bad connectivity, I'll do what I'd always intended: declare that I had nothing to do with the WN story; this was on purpose, since to have been involved would have breached our standards of neutrality and played into the hands of those who are keen to see bad faith. Sorry, we have to disappoint you on this occasion. But it's good to see that you both read the story. I haven't yet read it myself, and will soon. It was rather generous of Ed to put my name first: he did most of the work for this week's "News and notes". Tony  (talk)  12:40, 29 March 2013 (UTC)


 * FWIW, I did some copyediting on this piece while Tony was unavailable. While that sort of thing doesn't warrant a byline, it does warrant attention to possible COI issues.
 * If there is something incorrect in the piece, or some viewpoint that has been left out, this is the opportunity to articulate it.
 * —Neotarf (talk) 16:46, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Lack of support
Of course Wikinews – as most other Wikimedia projects do – lacks of support by the foundation. But worse: they do not just only not give support but indeed the WMF does not have any idea how to promote Wikinews, Wikibooks or Wikiversity. For instance, about ten months ago we asked, after the question was discussed in the German wikinews pressroom, how the foundation sees the legal circumstances concerning a change the configuration for the German Wikinews so that if an image is not available locall< the fall-back source was first the German Wikipedia and only after that Commons. There are images like logos or freedom of panorama works which are legal within the U.S. and Germany but can't be uploaded to the Commons for other reasons. The last news from Frisco was they'll tell us within ten days. That was ten months ago. Another thing was when I requested a feature like the gadget which helps to include citations, three years ago or so, just a short time after the Cite drop down was implemented here in the English Wikipedia. It is just boring to copy and paste title, URL and date from the source you're using while a smart browser widget similar to the since Firefox 3.0 not continued add-on WPCITE.xpi could save work and time. I don't have a clue how to code such a gadget but I think a professional could finish this within half an hour if so long at all. I never heard from the so-called "usability initiative". And like this, most of the Wikmedia projects other than Wikipedia do need just some little tricks to dealing better with the fact that MediaWiki wasn't developped for writing a newspaper or a book but we're don't get anything. We don't know where to ask, who to ask and still if we ask we wait for answers months and years. As a German Wikinews editor for five years and sysop for three years I know that Wikinews is serious business. But does the foundation know as well? --Matthiasb (talk) 22:02, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Should never have split from wikipedia
If I remember my history correctly, wikinews was formed as topics currently in the news received lots of attention from editors here. So it was decided to fork this off to its own site. I always though this was a problematic fork for a number of reasons: it created a divide between wikipedia editors and wikinews editors, separate log ins enhanced this split you could not easily go from editing a history article to a current event. This split created specialist journalist editors as opposed to the generalists on wikipedia. The other big problem was visibility, as the news site didn't have the en.wikipedia.org domain name the outside would simply didn't find the site, the domain name was the most valuable asset and we threw that away. There are numerous examples of current event articles receiving lots of edits here, and for some stories wikipedia can be the best source there is, so the concept of a wiki-news articles can work, but it needs to be part of a bigger pool of editors on a high visibility site. I'd propose creating a News: namespace here and merging the site back in.--Salix (talk): 13:24, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Benefits of Wikinews
I've read in this page that Wikinews is useless. Well, we can discuss about which of the current Wikinews edition is good or bad, and how they can be improved. But I strongly believe that it's a very relevant format and should be strengthened.

Having actual journalists who cover events, search for news and do interviews would be amazing, and I hope that we eventually do that. Doing just rehashes of press agancy pieces isn't so great, I agree. But Wikinews can get much better articles than that, even without professionals.

Most of current news articles have the format "somebody said something". Once a news company has journalists, it's cheap, their journalists put a microphone in front of people, ask them questions, and publish the answers. News isn't just that: it requires to describe the context in a historic perspective, compare opinions of different people, etc. We can do that. I've done that with a few articles on motorsport this past March. The news could be written in two sentences, but I wrote several paragraphs about the rest of the story. It takes quite a bit more effort, but it's worth it.

One of the arguments is that the wiki format is meant for things that grow over time, whereas news are finished once they are released. That's true. But I disagree that news are useless after a few hours or days. News articles are useful to see how people thought back then. So, the news about a politician getting elected president will describe the political context at that time. A Wikipedia article would be rewritten over and over, so when you read the latest version, you have a different perspective. It's good to have the original one too. --NaBUru38 (talk) 19:22, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Wikinews is a failed project
Wikinews cannot cover even major news stories to any depth, and its hostile environment means that very, very few editors work on it.

The only reason it still exists is because Wikimedia lacks any real way to shut down vanity projects, which can mobilise a few supporters to "snowball" polls before anyone else can come in. The project itself has to be notified - which seems fair enough, except that no other projects have to be, so the votes are skewed to the few people that actually put up with the site.

Wikinews should have died years ago. Adam Cuerden (talk) 22:46, 31 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Wikinews' coverage of some stories has been both exceptional and significant in my experience, certainly enough so to preclude considering the project a failure. —  C M B J   09:47, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Armenia
Hi, as far as I can see Wikimedia Armenia is the 39th chapter and not the 40th, as Wikimedia Kenya was disapproved some months ago. Regards, --Jcornelius (talk) 22:48, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Ach, that's my mistake; I thought that they had yet to add Armenia to Meta, but now I see that it is simply not listed under "Composition of chapters" yet. Thank you for the note. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 23:01, 28 March 2013 (UTC)