Wikireporter:Datrio/Polish Wikinews report - February 26, 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 12:38, 26 lut 2005 (UTC)

First Week

After one week of operation, we have about 10 active users (whom we call Wikireporters) and exactly 47 articles (up to 12:00PM UTC time) written. We also have a special feature which we called "Skrót wiadomości". Which translates literally into "News in short" - a sort of a news flash. This is used to cover stories which don't have full articles yet. Such stories are posted in the apropriate day category.

Due to the server downtime we didn't quite do the amount of work we would have liked to do. Some of us wrote stories offline and submited them later, when the site was up again. Thanks to those brave souls we've managed to avoid having an ugly one day black hole in our archives.

RSS Feed

We have a special, custom made RSS feed in PHP. It's a simple script which I've also made for the English Wikinews, but scrapped the idea, as a real RSS feed is close to be done. The feed can be found at http://datrio.info/personal/wikinews.php (just change the extension to phps to view the source).

User Comments

We've received pretty good comments from the Polish Wikimedia contributors. But critique was also present - some have stated that this project will never be able to compete with mainstream media. We've also had pretty good coverage in Polish Linux sites. But we also received some harsh critique here. We try to think through every remark and improve, we also keep reminding people that we're only just warming up and will be striving to make this site better and better as time goes on.

Sources

Right now we only compile news stories from several different sites (mainly from the Polish Press Agency - http://pap.com.pl/). We use some of the major Polish portals, like WP.pl (Virtual Poland), which compily their news from the PAP reports.

There is however one original piece of news - Akcja Szukam domu, which was submitted to us by a non-profit organization and is about a campaign aimed at helping orphans find new homes.

We plan to write our own articles in the not-so-near future - contact the police for interviews, visit our Parliament (Sejm) and so on.

To Do

Things which we still have to do, is translating the interface (the language file will be imported from pl.Wikipedia, but the developers are a bit too busy to help us with that right now) and get a few bots running so we can automate adding new date categories and other technical stuff.

Also, we have to get indexed by Google. Well, we can't do that, but it's still on our "to do" list.

Licence

pl.Wikinews, just like en.WN and de.WN is under public domain.

Vandalism

I have to note one thing - we almost didn't have any vandalism, yet. No phony articles, no fake info - everything is working alright so far. A calm before the storm? Let's hope not.