User:Telso/Wikinews

Although I wholeheartedly support Wikipedia and many of its sister projects, I cannot support Wikinews and think that not only is its mission flawed but it will detract human resources from other more worthwhile endeavours, particularly Wikipedia and its other sister projects.

Its mission statement states it

[seeks] to create a free source of news, where ... every human being is invited to contribute reports ... either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. (emphasis mine).

I highly and strongly doubt the first condition of the part I emphasized ("from direct experience") will be fulfilled in more than an incredibly small minority of articles published. Concerning the second condition ("summarized from elsewhere"), this is not journalism.

With very little chance at getting primary news sources, this project must be designated a news indexing site. The problem this introduces has to deal with the almighty POV. Human edited/compiled indexes are inherently POV as some articles (and therefore views) are more prominent. The difference between a news index (like Wikinews) and a knowledge index (like Wikipedia) is that visitors of a knowledge index usually know what they are looking for while visitors of a news index usually want to be presented with a varying number of news articles because they do not know what they are looking for. The best way to quickly order a large amount of information is not human ordering but computer ordering (using an algorithm).

This leads to the other disadvantage of Wikinews: its limited ability to gather stories from the entire spectrum of news in the time they are useful. Although an increased usage would increase output of stories, I (again) highly doubt Wikinews will be able to meet the output of stories required to dismiss this problem. The best way to quickly find a lot of information is not human searching but computer searching (again, using an algorithm).

The best news indexing site would be one that can assimilate many, many news stories in a very short amount of time and present them in an NPOV manner. The best method for producing this is a computer spider crawling news sites combined with a computer algorithm to sort stories according to reasonable criteria. I think the closest any site is to this (by far) is Google News and this is why I have no plans to stop using it. Also, because I think Wikinews is a drain on Wikipedia's resources (along with those of its other sister projects), I have no plans to contribute or even use Wikinews for fear it do even more damage than it has already done.