User talk:Eloquence/State of the Wiki: December 12, 2004

I think the biggest mistake is that we are focusing too much on our long term goals rather than our short term goals. One of our stated goals is being a competitor to news agencies like AP and Reuters. But even if something like this is possible, it is many, many years away before we can have that kind of quality and variety of articles. For now, we must focus on what can make us valuable in the short term. So we can't look to these agencies as a model for us to follow. In addition, having brief summaries of news that has already been covered better by everyone else will not make us valuable. I don't think blogs are valuable for summarizing the news, but for finding news interesting to their readers and having an opinion on it. This too is not the model Wikinews can follow. Instead we must figure out what it is we can do well. But we already know, don't we? Our mission statement says Wikinews will be useful "because it will provide free, neutral, integrated summaries of the news from elsewhere." It other words, our strength and value will lie in the quality of our articles. This is where we must focus our efforts. We can't just wait and hope having more people will improve the quality, we must figure out how to improve the quality now. I've written up these thoughts and more, along with a proposal on how to pool our resources on creating quality articles (rather than everyone doing their own thing), at Wikinews:Quality over Quantity. We only have one short term goal listed in our mission statement, and we are already failing it. Maybe some of you will think I'm jumping the gun, and that it needs more time to develop. But how much time should we give it? At the very least, we need to have more specific short term goals. Otherwise, how will we know things are moving in the right direction? - TalkHard 09:51, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)