Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2013/March

Future Wikinews

Wikinews needs some optimism. Hmmmm...

The year is 20XX.

A Wikinews reporter visits the WN Newsroom, to see a listing of articles currently being worked on, filtered by priority and association with topics within the reporter's expertise. All of these articles are being edited using the VisualEditor, and many are being edited by many editors at once, with live dialog between the reporters and speedy updating of the text via real-time collaboration. Automated systems are suggesting additional sources, popping up live excerpts and links to articles rapidly. The editors merely need to press a single button to add an article as a source, and the editing system retrieves the headline, time of publishing, and name of the news source automatically, rarely making mistakes. Browser extensions and smartphone apps likewise simplify adding of sources. Reviews happen swiftly, and the editor or editors in review mode on the article are able to verify the article's passing of each of the five categories one by one, even as a later revision is being prepared by the multitude of reporters. The articles are quickly published to the relevant portal(s), as selected by the article's editor(s), in a position and of duration relating to the story's weight.

Over in the Original Reporting section, live a/v feeds from on-the-scene Wikinews reporters are being supplied to Wikinewsies at their computers, who are marking short clips of the feeds as being particularly of relevance to the story; these can be run through by the reviewers to verify particular elements. Wikinewsies who are nearby a newsworthy event as it's happening are notified of this immediately, and can instantly notify others if they decide to cover the story on the scene. Other Wikinewsies can easily message them through the wiki.

The main page, portal pages, and "Other stories from X" boxes are all updated live. "This article has been updated." boxes appear above articles instantly when a newer version has been reviewed. Collaboration with Wikidata allows for data to be shared between projects, and thus updated more quickly. Elections, sporting events, death counts, and so on are all supplied with up-to-the-second data.

Hm, what else is awesome about WN once it has practically unlimited volunteers and awesome technology? ... --Yair rand (talk) 21:46, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

What's awesome about Wikinews —and, as I was remarking to someone off-wiki earlier today, the reason it still exists after years of aggressive ostracism by a substantial subcommunity of Wikipedia— is belief that fact is separable from opinion, that news is only as valuable as it is quality-assured purely factual and neutral before being published, and that people with strong opinions are capable of separating fact from their own opinions and reporting just facts in a neutral way (noting that "neutral" doesn't mean the same thing here as it does at Wikipedia).

One step at a time, we can walk around the world. I've been working for the past year and more on a set of template/javascript tools to effectively extend the wiki software with building blocks for interactive wizards. I'm not constructing an interactive wizard, I'm constructing tools for constructing interactive wizards. I mean to transform the whole character of the wiki... well, anyway, the point is it's a first step. We've known for years we have to be vastly more semi-automated (a lot is semi-automatable but also needs to keep a human touch), and it's glaringly obvious the only way it'll happen is if we write the software ourselves. So I'm building tools to reduce the task of writing interactive software to an exercise in wiki markup.

Collaborative news writing, btw, in the Wikipedian sense of "collaborative", turns out to not work well for news, one of the things discovered over time here. We have a fundamentally different kind of collaboration, mentioned at WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing and also my user page. Wikipedian collaboration is actually very inefficient, which is not a problem for an encyclopedia where arbitrary amounts of time can be applied — but it doesn't work for news, as news is a very different kettle of fish. There was a quite successful effort by Crtew and some of his students a while back, where each person wrote one or two paragraphs of a larger article, but ultimately it wasn't able to pass review until one writer had done a polishing pass over the whole thing to make it flow. --Pi zero (talk) 22:47, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

• Sorting articles being worked on by topic could be trivial (using categories), although at the current volume, people here didn't work on this: maybe the headlines already speak for themselves. Feel free to play with different layouts in your userspace. Defining what a priority is would need a discussion (I tend to take anything that is not covered in other news sources well, especially so if it is a major event with other sources being sensational but not informative about it; with everything else being low priority). Gryllida^✎✍ 12:55, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Wandering off topic, but given the low volume of publishing (2 articles a day on average), almost every news story will be featured on the front page for a bit. Categories are less important because we are not being overwhelmed with news that most people would need to filter. (Hopefully, this can change.) I like to do a lot of original reporting, and it tends to come in bursts. I find that a lot of my OR reporting is material other news places are not covering, or are not covering the same way. (Irene Villa interview was her first English language interview near as I can tell. Teresa Perales interviewed discussed a lot of things not discussed by other interviews. The Australian media did NOT cover the one Australian skier at the World Championships. I did not see a single story about the Romanian female skier at the IPC Alpine World Championships. Our interviews with the Australian team members at the IPC Nor-Am Cup where we were the only media there were amongst the most comprehensive of any Australian media organization I have ever seen.) When not doing OR, I do stuff that relieves stress (hence lately urinals and dinosaurs) or on topics I think important (gun control and laws impacting the media). Being neutral is a fantastic selling point. We are old school media where we are neutral and verifiable. What we get all depends on people's interests. --LauraHale (talk) 13:57, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Proposal to close all language Wikinews

Please see Wikinews:Water_cooler/policy#Proposal_to_close_all_language_Wikinews. -- Cirt (talk) 01:12, 29 March 2013 (UTC)