Brian McNeil, Craig Spurrier – Wikinews for Wikipedians – How News is easier then an Encyclopedia [Wikimania 2008 notes]

Image via Wikipedia

Wikinews is:

 

• Easy
• A type of document you see every day
• Goal of NPOV and professionalism
• Balance through diversity
• The option to do news briefs

 

Writing your first articles

First start with a synthesis article.  You gather multiple independent sources and read them, then use this to write the story in your own words. It’s important to attributes quotes and claims to relevant sources.

 

Wikinews allows and encourage original reporting. This is fundamentally different from the way Wikipedia works. There’s an accreditation process.

 

Wikinews did some interesting investigative work:

 

• Wikipedia usage by U.S. Senate staff members. Discovered some fascinating facts.
• Wikimedia fundraiser highlights webc-omic community’s frustration with Wikipedia guidelines.

 

Project peculiarities

 

• The Weekly quiz (in german, english, spanish, italian)
• The NPOV-freee Comments: namespace
• Email addressees for accredited contributors

 

The Wikimedia foundation has legal issues with giving out press credentials. So they’re working on a new organization to solve this problem. They’re hoping to have this launched for end of summer 2008.

 

Wikinews also have RSS feeds. This allows you to get news “as it happens” into your feed reader. They’re expanding this with categorization, so you’ll be able to subscribe to only certain categories.

 

News-edition weekly, is a printed weekly project done in a newspaper style. Depending upon communities support for project should be available in a few months.

 

There is also large interest in audio-news briefly, done in a podcast format.