Wikinews talk:Spread Wikinews

Birds of a feather

What can be done to both grow our audience and our contributors?

Wikinews reported on 2017-05-08 that 3,471,349 articles were started in 33 different Wikinews language communities, but only 222,328 (6.4%) were published (if I understand those numbers correctly). For the English language Wikinews, only 0.8% were actually published. Is it fair to say that the vast majority of unpublished articles represent frustrated humans, who are less likely to contribute to Wikinews in the future?

To increase the rate of submissions -- and our audience -- I think it would help to (a) understand why those articles were not published and (b) take steps to increase the publication rate. Examples:

• Not neutral or not credible: Some help in rewording or asking contributors to get input from their opposition in a conflict could help educate contributors and encourage them to do more. It may even help resolve conflict -- converting heat into light!
• Not newsworthy: If it's written from a neutral point of view citing credible sources, etc., can we “publish” it on a “back page” and / or get geolocation information and only offer the story to people nearby? I think boring reports on public meetings of governmental bodies should always be accepted, because they could help prevent (or expose) problems like the City of Bell scandal, where the death of a local newspaper seems to have encouraged a group of public officials to engage in massive criminality. Such articles should not be featured (except to people interested in that jurisdiction) but could be available for a search, e.g., link from a Wikipedia article about that governmental entity. (I believe the current minimal level of audience control of the media contributes to virtually every major problem facing humanity today; for documentation, see Winning the War on Terror. Wikinews might facilitate major improvements.)
• Not 'news' style: If it's written from a neutral point of view citing credible sources, etc., can we accept poor style and grammar for articles on a “back page,” hoping to encourage contributors to write other articles in the future? Some of those could be of sufficient general interest that other Wikinewsians might help rewrite them in 'news' style to convert them into “page one” stories. (Non-native speakers should be encouraged to try to bridge the language divide. If we had had this in the early 1950s, the U.S. war in Vietnam might have been avoided, because too many people would have known that roughly 80 percent of the Vietnamese supported the Communist Ho Chi Minh, as Eisenhower noted in his autobiography published in 1963.

I've proposed a “Birds of a Feather” session for Wikimania 2017, August 9-13, in Montreal to discuss these and related questions; see Submissions/Building Wikinews into the premier news site worldwide. Comments welcomed. DavidMCEddy (talk • contribs) 17:57, 8 May 2017

There's a water cooler discussion for this; fragmentation of discussion is a concern, I'd think. --Pi zero (talk) 18:11, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I've edited this slightly and reposted it there: Wikinews:Water cooler/policy#"Birds of a feather" session at Wikimania 2017?. Or would you prefer that we replace this discussion with a redirect of some kind or ...??? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 15:27, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Notes

The Spread Firefox link is dead: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ - 5CR1PT (talk)