Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2017/January

Suggestion for content

Cross-posting partnership Do you think that we could encourage more growth and activity here by seeing if other alternative media publishers would be willing to cross-post some content here? I wanted to run it by the community before I bothered even asking any other venue. I know that ProPublica allows some of their content to be posted elsewhere and the Independent Media Center has a kind of overlapping mission to ours. Maybe some public radio providers and stations would be interested in a partnership? I imagine that they would be willing to license some of their work for us, especially if we had a strong program of sharing info. Does this seem doable to anyone else? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:15, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

My first reaction is caution. Anything submitted needs to go through our review process; and we need to upgrade our review capacity — part of my long-term technical effort here — before we would be able to handle a major new influx of material. That said, any plans that can't be realized now might become workable later; so, with that in mind, what sort of alternative media publishers were you thinking of? --Pi zero (talk) 06:06, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Indy Media and ProPublica I mentioned above. I know that Common Dreams also posts media that are already CC-BY/CC-BY-SA licensed. For that matter, if we had a good relationship with some local alternative weeklies that might be good as well. Not necessarily something that skips review altogether or which works entirely as a link-trading scheme--I'm not suggesting some kind of news quid pro quo. But maybe if things can be "fast-tracked" for trusted sources or that we can have a banner on pages that are part of some kind of news-sharing. Mostly I'm thinking out loud here. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:26, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

For text, why bother releasing content already released elsewhere? It can actually be detrimental to do so; another language edition tried mass imports and while article counts exploded, readership plummeted and the contributor base withered. For other media, that's more interesting. A text-for-photos trade, for example could be of mutual benefit. So too could be a relationship where, say, an Internet radio show recorded our articles for broadcast and we got audio files. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 07:50, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@Blood Red Sandman: I'd definitely be more interested in learning about that mass-import project. Can you tell me how I can learn more? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:50, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Took me a moment to find, but meta:User:LauraHale/Wikinews Content Import Analysis. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 15:59, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@Blood Red Sandman: Fascinating and explains why sr.wn is larger than here (which I knew but not why). Could this be a problem of volume? Shooting from ~2 articles a day to ~100, almost all of which are imported is probably a factor. Maybe encouraging our partners to also link to us? As an aside, the study on m: says that pl.wn has ~25,000 pages but n:pl:Special:Statistics says ~11,000--did they mass-delete half of their content? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:14, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Sr's folly is certainly an extreme example. But it illustrates the basic underlying problem, which is a lack of point to repeating content found elsewhere, especially when that content's unlikely to match our own policies. (As to the pl discrepancy, I don't know the answer to that but would also love to find out.) BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 11:10, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

@Blood Red Sandman: I don't disagree with you--I can see that this could and has been a problem. It still seems to me like we can have more commentary or expand upon something here, even if its base is content from elsewhere. Maybe not. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:09, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Our review process is a bottleneck. We want some inflow of contributors, of course, but until we alleviate the bottleneck we won't be able to take advantage of a major increase in contribution. So the bottleneck needs to be addressed first. A few years ago, when the en.wn community split, with the "hard news" folks staying here and a significant faction leaving to form a non-wikimedia "fork", both sides of the split agreed the bottleneck is a problem, we just disagreed about how to address it. The faction who left wanted to lower standards for publication; the faction who stayed treated our review standards as central to the idealism that defines us and hoped to find other means to relieve the bottleneck. (The fork collapsed, which I see as an inevitable consequence of losing track of core ideals.) My plan is to develop semi-automated assistants so we can do the same human tasks but do them more easily. --Pi zero (talk) 17:16, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Need more "Lead article" templates?

Shall we have template:lead article 6 and Template:Lead article 7? We have six new articles published today. --George Ho (talk) 23:22, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Seven now :) Back in the day, not every article made it onto the leads and there's no policy requiring them to. With output low, however, it makes sense to give every article at least some exposure. That said, if we were in a position were we routinely had the content to justify it, I wouldn't be opposed per se to a modest expansion to how many stories we can have up at once. Today was a good day, and we should be pleased, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 23:52, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

It occurs to me that the leads on the main page are chosen to match the size of a typical non-mobile device screen. --Pi zero (talk) 23:59, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

And the mobile version lists stories vertically, putting the astronaut obituary at the end. --George Ho (talk) 01:47, 19 January 2017 (UTC)