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Comment by supermdguy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what's going to happen to wikinews: https://wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Nothing's happened since about 2006, so ...

This is actually the great fear about WikiTribune: that it'll end up like Wikinews - nice launch, then drop to near no activity, point or interest. (I was along for the WikiTribune hack day in February, this is one of the things that was discussed at length.)

In my experience, contributing to Wikinews was a daily grind compared to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was a chance to craft something long lasting over a period of time. Wikinews involved a similar amount of effort per article but invariably the item was largely irrelevant a day or two after it was written. It was hard to keep the news current.

Out of curiosity, do you know if the group has any specific ideas in this regard and what they are?

Basically the perception was that Wikinews was bogged down in process. So we came up with a simple obvious process on the spot.

Then I looked up the Wikinews process ... and it was about the same. So clearly that wasn't the problem.

The difference with WikiTribune is that there are paid journalists. This will I think help.

Thanks for the reply. Paid journalists make sense, in that they can probably produce words faster than an amateur. I hope it's a success.

also, a lot of the discouraging factor at Wikinews was that the editors were slow to review stuff, and WikiTribune has paid editors as well.

It will get killed by him (isn't Jim involved in both Wikipedia AND Wikia), just like Wikia meant the end of the "trivia" sections that were very popular on Wikipedia and featured on most articles up to the release of Wikia, then they got transferred over and banned from Wikipedia.

Jimmy actually lacks that specific authority. His control is limited to blocking users and removing rights from users [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Role_of_Jimmy_Wales#...

Jimmy Wales used to have more authority. It was stripped from him by the community after he repeatedly abused it. However, despite this he still has the technical ability to not just remove arbitrary permissions from any user on any project but to grant them too, including to himself. (This is, in fact, mentioned in the link you posted - you must just have missed that part.)

What is the difference to Wikinews in the first place?

Wasn't a similar question asked by the maintainers of Nupedia when Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia as an unexpected side project?

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars (ideally with PhDs) to volunteer content.

I'm afraid that doesn't tell us the difference between Wikinews and WikiTribune.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia

I read your comment as "What's the difference to Wikinews", which is literally what you wrote, but you may have meant "with" which means my response was not directly relevant. WT ostensibly has made some changes/refinements -- which have tradeoffs that might be seen as undesirable to entrenched conventions at WN -- but it does seem that, on paper, WT and WN have the same fundamentals, i.e. what makes a Wiki what it is. And the content may not be substantively different either -- in fact, they could be mirrors of each other.

But my argument is that if WT's differences -- even if they are seemingly superficial like visual design and polish -- are enough to give WT even a veneer of authority and user-friendliness over WT, then the lack of fundamental differences is mostly besides the point. WT is a direct competitor to WN, few users are going to want to spend time/loyalty to both sites. And unlike Wikipedia, which has huge long-tail value, writing for a news site with a comparatively small audience would be a bit demoralizing when you could be writing for the much bigger competitor, especially if the pay (zero dollars) is exactly the same.

So the difference to WN is that if WT becomes more popular -- which it could just by Jimmy Wales continuing to be its salesman -- WN might become quickly lose its audience and purpose for existence.

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