Wikinews:Wikinewsie
If you're helping work towards the Wikinews project goals, you can pretty much consider yourself a Wikinewsie. However, what this page mainly discusses is Wikinewsie.org a loosely associated site run by Wikinews contributors as an adjunct to the news production process here on Wikinews.
Introduction
The purchase of Wikinewsie.org was effectively a spur-of-the-moment decision for long-time contributor Brian McNeil. One of the first things set up using the domain was email addresses for all accredited reporters. This is apparent on many user's pages with the contact addresses of the form firstname.lastname@wikinewsie.org. This small step to credibility, and away from hotmail and gmail addresses, has significantly improved the response rate for email queries.
Other experiments and developments on Wikinewsie.org
With a full hosting and email package obtained for the Wikinewsie.org domain, a variety of options are open in using the domain to build a credible online presence.
Email addresses
- As soon as any Wikinews contributor receives community accreditation, they can request—if not automatically issued—an email address on the wikinewsie.org domain.
- The standard format for such is: firstname<dot>lastname
wikinewsie.org. They will also be added to the list of recipients for the general contact address, scoop wikinewsie.org.
- In addition to accredited reporters here on the English-language Wikinews, those from other language projects which have a similar accreditation process may request wikinewsie.org email addresses.
Website
The Wikinewsie.org website has, in recent times, seen improvements aimed at making it of more use to the community, and particularly accredited reporters.
For ease of management, much of the content that is publicly accessible is held in WordPress; this is largely for convenience in using such as a Content Management System.
From the main page of the Wikinewsie.org site, accredited reporters can access the webmail interface for their reporters' email accounts, The Editors' Blog – a blog for longstanding, widely-trusted Wikinewsies (whether accredited or not), the Journalists' Workspace – a closed/private wiki for embargoed and under-development stories, plus short-cuts directly to the secure-access versions of currently-active language versions of Wikinews.
Blogs
The Editors' blog
Created for professional commentary on the news generation process, sharing experiences in more-complex or difficult reporting and other commentary which would fall foul of policies such as Neutral Point of View here on Wikinews itself.
Wikignomes.com
Yet another spur-of-the-moment purchase.
Wikignomes.com is currently virtually-unused. It has thus been set up as a multi-site install of WordPress which any Wikimedia Foundation wiki contributor, largely in good standing, may request their own blog on.
Ignore the 'tacky' default page: skins extensions, widgets et-al can be installed as required.
- And, yes, you can have a username wikignomes.com (or yourblog.wikignomes.com) email address to go with it.
Closed wiki
As-noted above, wikinewsie.org hosts the Journalists' Workspace. As-of June 2012 this is hosted in Amsterdam; regrettably, it is still currently only available via http://. Longer-term it is intended to move the wiki to Iceland—thus taking advantage of their far-stronger press protection and freedom laws—and to obtain an SSL certificate which will allow it to operate via https://.
- Note!
- Due to access to the site being without the use of encryption, those with accounts should not use the same password as for here, or for any other account they may have elsewhere!
The Wikinews "tool server"
The latest addition to the "toys to help with reporting" is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) running in a datacentre somewhere in Iceland.
Due to a long history of 'problems' with the Wikipedia-centric toolserver, and bots running on that mysteriously vanishing/dying, we now have our own dedicated processing power.
As a very new addition to the tools at our disposal, we're open to suggestions on how it might best be used. The initial, in development, facilities are as follows:
- NewsieBot — a bot, developed for our accredited reporters with press accreditation for the 2012 Paralympic Games.
- The key function of this bot is to work with Dropbox (and, longer-term, to migrate to the open-source ownCloud alternative) thus greatly simplifying getting content such as images, audio, and video either into English Wikinews, or the Journalists' Workspace directly from the devices (mobiles, tablets, whatever) of reporters in the field/stadium/warzone.
- If you want to know why it's called dalek.wikinewsie.org, ask the mad man with the box.
Goals
The key goal with Wikinewsie.org is to build a set of complementary tools that, when put alonside Wikinews, give a more rounded news experience. A key constraint is use of Open Source tools where possible; ideally at some point the domain will be handed over to the WMF and the infrastructure managed by them.
To Do
A unifying site design that looks to Wikinews (eg, in colour scheme) but is a distinct identity.- Clarification of division of blogs.
- Clarification of use of wiki:
Obituaries, Investigations, Embargoed material. - Move all bots which update any language version of Wikinews to our private server.