Response to Public consultation about Wikinews
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This is a response to Public consultation about Wikinews.
In consultation above, the Sister Project Task Force (SPTF) noted that Wikinews are mainly active in Russian, English, German languages, and user base is pretty low. Coverage of events is not "all rounded". Newcomers do not stay engaged while at e.g. Wikipedia they would. Most of visitors are bots.
This page purpose is to summarize feedback received at talk page of the above consultation, and local wiki discussions, in actionable format in two parts. In the first part actionable changes are listed. The second part aims to provide a list of expected deliverables.
Why Wikinews
[edit]The objective of Wikinews is to provide timely reports, including citizen journalism, in a variety of formats (video, audio, text) in many languages, with a neutral point of view.
Citizen journalism means an opportunity to report on very local events, eg n:Players line up for the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 in New York City, as well as expose details exclusively, e.g. n:Wikinews interviews DuckDuckGo, Opera, Mozilla, Wikimedia about DoNotTrack feature.
Working on news report requires extensive collaboration in real time to write and to reach audiences. This is not required at any other sister wiki. The software Platform requires several modifications for this to work better; see below.
Suggested actionable changes
[edit]- Software idea at n:User:Gryllida/sandbox assisted writer
- Reach out to citizen journalism organizations. Ask them how the workflow and user engagement could be improved.
- Improve onboarding. Each new user should be asked to select: region, topic of interest, activity type (making new stories, revising stories, or being involved as reader only).
- Training modules to be provided based on what the user selected.
- Echo needs to be modified to ping user groups such as "Oceania" or "Science" or "Reviewers" or "Proofreaders". On other wikis it is less important, but on Wikinews it is needed for speed.
- Notifications to be provided, via Newsletter extension, to update the user on what they selected (new drafts, new messages, or merely new completed stories). This should increase non-bot traffic.
- Translation utilities to be implemented where they are easy to discover and are easy to use.
- Universities to be contacted to use Wikinews for teaching journalism, like it was done with n:CAT:UoW.
- Google News to be contacted to add Wikinews in its feed. After User:Brian McNeil passed away, it got removed and contact was lost.
- Re-assess criteria for peer review. A proposal was previously made to check for "who, what, where, why, how" only in the first paragraph and not do full reviews. Initially this may lead to improved user engagement and increased size of user groups (aka WikiProjects).
- Develop app for Android perhaps like https://gryllida.neocities.org/news/writer/v3/index-3 with auto import into wiki ?
- Implement tool for semi automatic news feed posts to social media such as Facebook, Bluesky, X, Mastodon.
- Create audio Wikinews and publish on podcast sites.
- Request assistance to assess pages in Ru.WN for copyright violations, maybe copied ru.wp content with incompatible licence.
- Create platform for users to provide news tips and include original questions to be considered in the news report
Expected deliverables
[edit]- Increased all roundness of news.
- Increased engagement with regional and topic streams to consistently produce original content, including photo essays, interviews, which are not found in Wikipedia.
- Engagement of journalism students and language learners and teachers at Wikinews.
- Increased human, non-bot reader traffic.
- Increased activity in Wikinews in other languages, not only top 4.
- Output in a variety of formats including audio, video
- Increased exposure at social media, podcasting, and video sharing platforms including Mastodon, Telegram, Facebook, X, Matrix, SIP, XMPP, lemmy, video, YouTube, Spotify, BlueSky
- Option to subscribe to selected topics to get news into email inbox
- Platform for user-contributed questions to create exclusive reports in local, technical and scientific areas
- Real time collaboration and group communication software that can also improve workflows at English Wikipedia, where users from a Wikiproject may become more connected and more discoverable.