Expanding Content

I am keenly interested in exciting and promising projects that the Foundation has failed to support properly (and usually for the very good reason of being overwhelmed at just keeping Wikipedia running) - and in drawing lessons from those in our thoughts about the future.

My best example is Wikinews. The concept is exciting, the community is great, and yet the project has quite simply not lived up to the potential. Wikinews is not becoming *a* mainstream news source, much less a major news source that changes the way people think about quality journalism.

There are a lot of reasons for this. The software hasn't been adapted to their needs. Funding has not been available to build critical mass. People often prefer to write for Wikipedia because the audience at Wikipedia is bigger. And so on. The participants of Wikinews can better catalog the reasons that it is has struggled than I can.

So for me, the thought naturally arises: how to fix this? What can we do for Wikinews that will resolve what I see as the core structural issues. My own view, put forward only tentatively and quietly until now (and even now I offer it only with quiet humility as a cautious idea), is that we should consider spinning it off with some funding from Wikimedia, some traffic promises in terms of linking to it from the home page or something like that, and support in the form of PR and communications. I'm agnostic as to whether it should be spun off to a nonprofit, or a community-owned for-profit, or a venture-backed something or other, or or or. I have no strong opinions about that.

But I do wonder if an organization with it's own CEO, own programming staff, etc., couldn't push forward the goals of Wikinews much better than the Wikimedia Foundation ever will. I don't know. I merely raise the issue for contemplation.