Wikireporter:Datrio/Polish Wikinews report - April 8, 2005

This is a report on the current state of the Polish Wikinews project, written for the international community. Feel free to add your remarks and ask questions on the Talk page. Dariusz Siedlecki 14:18, 8 kwi 2005 (UTC)

Statistics

• User base: 80 users
• Administrators: 4 users
• Number of edits: 5140
• Average page length: about 1600 bytes
• Original articles: 7
• Most popular categories: Sport and Politics
• Vandalism: None

I think the number of news stories ammounts to more than 250, and we have about 14 active users. We had no problem with vandalism - that's why the main page is still *gasp* unprotected!

Wikiportals

This was the codename for our thematic categories, but we're changing it. So far, there's only discussion and drafts of regional and thematic portals. We plan to make a regional portal for every big region in Poland (and more can be added, if simply, anyone will participate in it) and have some thematic portals - one for computers and internet, one for movies and games (entertainment), one for politics, etc.

Automatization

Thanks to <DynamicPageList> it's easier for us to add the list of stories on many pages. Unfortunerly, our custom RSS feed broke because of that, but I plan to fix that soon. Also, I've wrote a bot called Datbot which takes care of creating any date categories, and stuff like that.

Current focus

Right now, we're focusing on one thing - the Wikiportals mentioned above. We're also thinking about how to make Wikinews more user friendly - I'm mainly talking about easier news navigation. We also still have to write our meta pages. But we still aren't close to coming out of the beta status.

We have an average of 4-7 articles per day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. We had one day without any articles, but by myself, I don't think this is such a bad thing, taking in account our small user base. We had a few original reporting articles, but we haven't really went out on the field to gain information.

Interesting notes

If we have a very interesting scoop, we can quickly write up a good quality article. For instance, we had info about the earthquake near Sumatra as one of the first Wikinews projects, same with the Terri Schiavo death. Sadly, we can name only a few articles "really good". We had a very interesting real-time report on the boxing fight between Michalczewski and Tiozzo - as the first news service in Poland.

We also have very interesting articles from our Lower Silesia Regional Portal - which many "important" news sources miss. Many people may call them non-important, but at least we find them interesting - and hope our users will understand.

Pope John Paul II

As the late pope was from Poland, we were really interested by what's happening with him. During the last few days, close to 70% of our news articles were related to him. We also had some NPOV questions - should we call him "The Holy Father", or not? Should we change the Wikinews colours to black so we can mourn him, or not? Should we do anything to show our sadness, or not? We didn't do anything - only created many articles related with his health and death. Some may call it a bad thing, others may agree we did a good thing.