Talk:Response to Public consultation about Wikinews

Feedback?

Please read the page and share ideas? Cc @Ssr @PereslavlFoto @Revi C. @Base @Itu @Kitabc12345 @RockerballAustralia @Koavf @Cromium

+ Anything else i am missing at Talk:Public consultation about Wikinews

+ Could you please inquire at water cooler of sister wikis eg Wikidata, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Commons

Thanks 😊 Gryllida 14:49, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Heavy Water --p.s. i invite all to edit the page directly with improvements. Gryllida 15:23, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

@Asked42 ^^ Gryllida 15:32, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

I am tired of these constant attacks on Wikinews. Unfortunately I have critically little time and access to a good internet nowadays, so didn't have an opportunity to see what this current attack is like. My general thought without reviewing any current context is that Wikinews still has a huge potential, and I would say as the time goes and more and more governments curb free media in their respective countries, the potential only rises. Also Wikipedia should stop writing about current events. The biggest limiting factor is lack of technical support and resistance to any attempts to compensate that by volunteers, as I personally believe WMF not wanting to deal with the technical difficulties Russian Wikinews was creating them was a big contributing factor in Krassotkin's WMF fan (combined with his own frustration and thus lack of well mannered communication). ---Base (talk) 15:40, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Base

• i think it would be good to have some group that is 'global' ie not only on one wiki.
• There is wikinews-l mailing list. Are you on it?
• Would you join a IM platform such as Matrix or Signal or Telegram for real time collaboration on technical and non technical issues?
• It could be good to have fortnightly group meetings coordinated via doodle or an open source equivalent. Would you agree? And would you possibly be interested in coordinating that?

Thanks. Gryllida 20:29, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

I think there is (was?) a Telegram group, I am/was in one of them, I don't know what other ones are there. FWIW we can always rollback to #wikinews on IRC, it works just fine. Unfortunately my country has stripped me of capacity to maintain even a basic activity level, I cannot coordinate anything in the nearest future. --Base (talk) 19:02, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

which of the changes proposed on this page (the one this is a talk page of) do you find meaningful?

Are there any users in wiki with coding or sysadmin experience? It would be good to invite them to something, be it a wiki page, a mailing list, or an IM platform? Gryllida 20:33, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Agree with Base on tiredness problem. Rest of my answer is here. --Ssr (talk) 19:05, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Ssr which of the changes proposed on this page (the one this is a talk page of) do you find meaningful? Please also see my questions to Base above, if you could reply to them, I would appreciate it. Are there any users in ru.wn with coding or sysadmin experience? It would be good to invite them to something, be it a wiki page, a mailing list, or an IM platform. Gryllida 20:33, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Goals and anti-goals

I stopped when I got to this sentence: "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."

I think that it might be useful to think about the things that people want to have from a news website, and divide them up into categories. For example, we might see:

What does Wikinews want to accomplish?

Goal	Nice but not necessary	Anti-goal
10+ news articles each day	Original news articles	Spam
Video, audio, and text	Citizen journalism	Advertisements
(etc.)

NPOV is a slightly uncomfortable concept for a newspaper; it almost fits, but not quite. In particular, the Wikipedia model of applying NPOV to an isolated article is not consistent with how scholars or the general public evaluate the neutrality of news sources. Instead, a news outlet that is understood as "neutral" is being judged by the subjects they write about.

To give an example, imagine that a new volunteer decides to write one short Wikinews article per day, every day, for 100wikidays. These will be original news articles and true citizen journalism. Every sentence will comply with w:en:Wikinews:Neutral point of view.

The newcomer decides to pick a theme. And this is where we run into neutrality problems. If the newcomer's theme is:

• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about immigrant success stories: Wikinews is now a pro-immigrant publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about immigrants who were convicted of violent crimes: Wikinews is now a xenophobic, anti-immigrant publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about women in business: Wikinews is now a biased women's news publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about women caring for their families instead of working outside the home: Wikinews is also now a (differently) biased women's news publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about men in business: Wikinews is now a misogynistic anti-woman publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about people of color in business: Wikinews is now a leftist woke DEI fake news publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about police violence: Wikinews is now a leftist, anti-police publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about police capturing violent criminals: Wikinews is now a right-wing, pro-police publication.
• 100 NPOV-compliant articles about police helping people: Wikinews is now an apologist publication trying to whitewash the complexities of policing.

If Wikinews aims to be centrist (e.g., neither politically left nor right), then it can't have NPOV-compliant articles on subjects associated with political positions without also equally covering subjects associated with other political positions. While there are some subjects that have limited connections to politics, most of them do.

So I wonder: Does Wikinews want to be an unbiased news site, or does it want to be a news site that writes neutrally about the biased subjects it covers? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:47, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Ok, you showed examples of topic selection bias. Wouldn't each of these articles about, for example, policing successes, include a response from people who hated police, as the article is required to be neutral? And then publishing on selected topics like that is less a problem. (The goal is for each article to be neutral; neutrality of the whole news outlet is achieved by reviewers not discriminating based on topic. They do this anyway as I lack skill in comprehwnding sport or US politics articles, for example, so it takes me longer to review; I try to do that anyway.) Gryllida 20:50, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. A neutral article about an event ("Police officers raise money to give bicycles to 50 local kids") is not "balanced" by adding an irrelevant anti-police comment ("It's nice that the police are helping children, but I think it is unfair of the police to remove activists who are blocking highways. We are choosing to disrupt traffic, and we should be allowed to do that!"). If someone objected to the specific subject of the article ("All this public service volunteer work is distracting from their real job. Maybe if those officers quit volunteering to help school children in their own time, then they would spend more time making my neighbors be quiet at night!"), then that might be appropriate to include.

However, that doesn't change the fact that "the whole news outlet" is not neutral. You are behaving neutrally, but your results aren't neutral.

See also every tech company that has said some version of "Of course we hire almost only white and Asian men. Hardly any women apply for coding jobs. Naturally we are perfectly neutral and non-discriminatory and none of this is our fault." WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:10, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Of course selection bias is always an issue on wikis, but wouldn't the same potential criticism of Wikinews apply equally to Wikipedia? Pharos (talk) 23:57, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Yes, it does (see, e.g., the gender gap), but people routinely judge news sites by a different standard. Nobody ever says of a news outlet "Well, they only cover the subjects that have been approved by the state media censor, but the individual things they cover are just the bare, unmanipulated facts, so that makes them a neutral, unbiased source of news" or "They've never once printed anything negative about this politician. They follow the rule that if they can't say anything nice about him, then they shouldn't say anything at all. Everything positive that they say is warranted, so that makes them a neutral, unbiased source of news". See also w:en:Media bias for a long list of types of bias (including "coverage bias") in news media.

With Wikipedia, most readers are only looking for one subject at a time, and they are going to judge that individual article in isolation. It's great if you have an article on this obscure art film that I want to know about. If you don't happen to have an article on some other film, it doesn't matter to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 30 July 2025 (UTC)