Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2014/May

Study about collaborative production

Dear Wikinews member

We hope this message finds you well. We are writing you as part of the European Project P2Pvalue.eu in order to invite you to take part in a survey. The survey is part of a research project about how certain design aspects might explain collaborative communities' capacity to generate value and resilience. Wikinews is one of a sample of 300 cases of collaborative production we are asking to complete the sample. We identified 350 though the Directory of common - based peer production (http://directory.p2pvalue.eu/). Research results will be published with open access licences, and if you so choose, we will send it to you when the study is finished. The resulting raw data will be anonymized and will be made publicly available with a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA) in the P2Pvalue project website. For each completed survey, we will donate 5 euros to Wikipedia. Thank you in advance for taking part. The survey should not take you more than 15 minutes.

To participate, please click on the link below. Sincerely, The P2P value project & IGOPnet team (researchers of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

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Click here to do the survey: http://p2p-value.limequery.org/index.php/survey/index/sid/363169/newtest/Y/lang/en —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 147.83.182.7 (talk • contribs)

This message was also canvassed to English Wikiversity. Microchip08 (talk) 17:08, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

RSS and ATOM feeds

I have only just started using Wikinews and have subscribed to the RSS feed. I was shocked by how few items are listed, only four when I first checked. Why is this, is it just lack of effort? I was looking for the Eurovision results, but not only where they not listed on the feed, there is no link on the page when opened. The page seems to be dominated by Nigel Farage's visit to Scotland, a severe case of undue weight if ever I saw one. Searching for "Eurovision" in the search box was no help either; the top result was a Finnish metal band from 2006. The usefulness of the feed could be hugely improved simply by adding more items.

I don't really understand why the feed page does not open onto the main page of the site like most other news sites. It seems like a waste of effort to maintain an entirely separate page for the rss feed. It doesn't need a separate page, just a list of the links to go on the feed. SpinningSpark 10:14, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

RSS and Atom feeds are designed to be easily communicated information used by other software which will manage the display of the information. It is assumed that such feeds will only include the content, and not the layout, since it will often be aggregated with many other streams from many different feeds to allow the end user to select which sources to receive. - Amgine | t 16:59, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

I understand that's how the streams work. My basic point is that there are very few headlines in the feed. For instance, today there are only five headlines listed in my feed. None of them cover important world events such as the fighting in Ukraine, the kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls by Bocol Harem, or the earhquake in Mexico. SpinningSpark 17:09, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

• "undue weight"?

As the person who went and ran about taking several hundred photos, filming a load of video footage, and spending 8-10 hours turning that into the report on Farage's 'welcoming committee' for his second official visit to Scotland, I find that a little ridiculous.

There are over 1500 results in Google News for Eurovision, so it is extremely well-covered by the mainstream media. Wikinews volunteers write about what interests them. Personally, I'd prefer sticking hat pins into my frontal lobes over reporting on Eurovision, but that's — from the volume of coverage — a 'minority' opinion.

In the past, Mike Halterman did some interesting original work on Eurovision. None of our current contributors are as-interested in light entertainment, hence no coverage of the Eurovision 2014. Whether or not the event actually qualifies as "news" is quite a different discussion, though. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 04:36, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Please don't think that I am trying to belittle your efforts. They are much appreciated, and as a matter of fact I am very interested in the doings of Nigel Farage and not very interested in Eurovision. The only reason I mentioned Eurovision was that that was the specific issue which brought me to Wikinews; I had heard the result on NDR Info but as my German is not very good I wasn't sure if I could believe what I thought I had heard. My point about "undue weight" was that yesterday when I clicked "open wikinews" I got a page with all four stories in the RSS feed list concatenated together. That was, of course, completely dominated by the pictures of Farage and the protests against him. For a site delivering worldwide news it is certainly undue weight to give two thirds of the space to a parochial British politician from a minority party. However, when I clicked "open wikinews" today I was merely taken to the site main page which is what I would expect. I have no idea why that has changed (possibly because my browser was updated last night).

My main point is as stated above, there is very little on the rss feed, and what there is misses important international stories. SpinningSpark 17:09, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

It sounds as if you may be misunderstanding Wikinews's mission, and — perhaps — also greatly underestimating the difficulty of news production. (Re the difficulty, although you'll find Wikinewsies, including I, can be quite critical of mainstream media, I for one at least am also quite cognizant, while criticizing them, that they're undertaking a genuinely difficult task.) --Pi zero (talk) 17:31, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Well that prompted me to search to see if you had a mission statement and indeed you do. What is it that I have misunderstood? SpinningSpark 17:45, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

We (and this includes you, as our community includes our readers) have a mission to present current news, which is why the feed only displays recently published articles. However, we cannot be comprehensive and cover all stories, or even most, or even just the popular trending stories. Instead, our writers focus on stories which are interesting to them. The second half of our mission (which is rarely considered) is to provide a permanent archive of free news articles providing a record of what was known when. Each article is a snapshot of time, rather than constantly updated as further information is known about the news event. - Amgine | t 18:07, 12 May 2014 (UTC)