<...> The number is how many chars were changed when theydid their edit there are people who sit ther and watch this all day long b/c this is what they're interested in doing there's been a lot of research about how fast wp catchs and reverts malicious edits looks like they took a big chunk out of the article that ws extraneous stuff... [Q: (unint) track/filter edits ? ] amg: we don't. wp and the wikii sforware isn't designed to prev3ent problems it's designed to make them really easy to fis it takes half an hour for a vandla to vandlaixex, but it takes me wo clicks with a mouse to fix it so there' really no point.. suually thei're kids in high school usually it's some high shcol some pacle, or library if it's a major problem... we'll block them for 24 hours. that will usually tell them... the same is true of wikinews. But... we're news! supposedly that means we're more important than an article in an encyclopedia... which isn't true, but... it's easy to fix, and it doesn't really take that mujch time. editing a wiki was designed to be very easy. if you look at this text that I highlight here, that's the actuall link. [showing off wiktiext] that will creat a lin to the article [[bay of pigs]] b/c it's enclosed in two square braakcets. the amnesty int'l artricle on wikinews has some links to some outside soures. quite a lot of them, actually... [describes the process of making an external url] with that information, you've already done almost everythning taht's in a wikimedia article. b/c you just need the links by titles for within the site, or by url for what's without the site. you also want to ad in graphics, too. <...> you can just click down to a previous version, and see... [re: histories] I mentioned that we've had a couple of dedicated assaults on wikinews; one of them has just discovered that you can repplace graphics. [goatse vandalism] the first time it was up for about a minute, almost; the second time it was up for almost 15 min, b/c we hadn't realized wehre he'd stuck it. so that one ittle graphic caused us a lot of embarrssment b/c it was up for so long. we only have about 2k people working on wikinews, but wp has about 114k people. just the differences in scale mean that they're a bit faster than we are. almost all the images that we /use/ are usually some form of cc license. there are people that do upload images that are copyrighted; those get deleted regularly b/c we're paranoid about c we're really /too/ paranoid about c b/c it infringes on our ability to do stuff. we've accepted (recently) two kind of fair use : publicity stills and ? photos [note about non-comm licenses] if it's under such a license or a no-derives license, we can't use it. we only use cc-by-sa (photo credit) [Q: (unint) do you have some standard... 24 hours, there's always somebody monitoring vandalism? ] amg: this channel I've got up now is our newsroom. we've got 13 languages so far, and editors from all these languages ... are on this channel. <...> this is where the image I was talkinga bout was vandalized (just this morning) [looking at block log?] I locked out thee old image, so it can't be replaced again. [same questioner again: do you have an organization to be sure that every second 24 hrs has been covered? ] amg: no, b/c we're volunteer we only rely on vol's who want to do it. there are times in the morning espevcally, about 3am our time before the europeans get going, there have been times when nobody is watching. that's when... when a vandal is willing tos tay up that late, or gret up that early, it's more likely to stay up for longer than a few minutes. ... [Q: c infringement, libel... ] [ on-webcast-screen : amgine is subtitled "wikimedia foundation" :) ] amg: [copyvio discussion] it turned out the copyvio was going the other way around, somebody was stealing our articles rather than our stealing theirs. [Q: when you say someone is watching, what does that mean? Is there some kind fo screening process? amg: no, it goes up immediately, but if I were watching RC... [explains] I can watch [an article] all the time if I'm interested in that; in this case I'm watching everyting in the database; every possible edit. everything on the website will get listed here. again if we go back over to... in the time we've been talking, over 600 edits have happened. there are people who are watching... [notes on rcbirds] [26|22:50] RCBIRDS BABY! <...> these are the latest stories. we've found taht by putting it up there on the front page, it's more likely to get looked at. more people are likely to go in ther and say 'that's baloney!' ... if it's not on the front page, it's not going to get looked at. officially, they're listed as 'not published' . we have to list something as published... once they get moved over to the, what's called the latest news session, even though it's really just... an archive, [they're published] the people who are just readers, the vast majority of people on wikinews, are note interested in editing; so they ignore [this dev. stories] box. the people editing the site are less intersted in the latest news, since they've been involved in each story as it gets developed. [Q: who decides what our lead articles are? ] amg: anybody who's looking at the article. if they think it's more imporant than what's currently up, or what's currently up has gotten too old, we'll replace it. [Q: sth about comparison of popularity with wikipedia] amg: no, that's impossible. I don't konw if... we don't even... this is our reach right now. [alexa graph] we are 13,016 in ranking all the sites alexa graphed. yesterday wer wer 35k. our traffic goes up and down very rapidly; it's strongly based on what's in the news right now. other websites, like wikipedia, are much more stable, much flatter, simply b/c they're not as affectd by news cycles. if we have a big news story ,lke the earthquake in indo or ja suddenly traffic will spike we'll have lots of people going in therea and doing things; you'l find those are more nes junkies. [Q: what do you find wikipedia and wikinews are best for? ] amg: local news. there's no q that when it comes to... [26|22:56] Local news baby! when it comes to original reporting, we don't do much. and what we do has alway been, or almost exclusively been, local news styuff that people do in their hometown, in their local neighborhood. it's nes that isn't being covered elsewhere. we write... what there's news abot, not necc what people are interested in /reading/ about [Q: is there any place the writer can get a response from people who are reading? ] amg: it's p0ossible in the software, but it's being turned off b/c it's a really big db drag. here are stats of the whole server; at the moment they're running at 1200 hits/sec if each and every time it gets a hit it also has 5o figure out how many people have viewed that page, it will really drag down the db [q: who's paying for the infrastructure?] amg: us. it's all donations. we've recently dgotten, I think 4 servers begin donated by yahoo. strictly donation. the rest has all been bought by people. sometimes as a gift for wmf; mostly it's been bought by donations. they had a fundraiser about a month.5 ago, probably a second one this year it really depends on when we run out of money, then we hold a ufndraiser. [q: how do you raise?] amg: w3e put a tag up at the top of the page... (every page) saying we need donations; and that's all we neeced. again, it's a volume case; 1200 times a second, that message is being sent out. [q: is it a money-making thing?] amg: no. we now have three part-time employees; they primarily work for donation; we have one person who is a developer, one person who does our finances, and one person who goes down to the big colo in tampa bay, to do service on our servers. [q: we meanig wikimedia? wikinews?] amg: we meaning wmf. it's a nonrofit, a 5013c. primarily formed b/c wp was very succ. and then started spining off other projets. you can't have everytihg answering to just wp; they decided rather than fighting over who tg3ets what attention, we'll fcreate a separate group to ... manage paying the bills, etc. that actually led to the creation of another website, called the meta-wikimedia it's become another website, re: how to do what we're doing, what our phuilosophies are; it's also multilingual... so much of our stuff is not in english. The english Wikpedia is the largest single knowledge base in the world. it's got over half a mill articles, going on 600k. it's 20% of the wp project. the rest of it's in other langs. we have 190 langs, and it keeps growing. somewhere in here I actually had a page for that... anyways, b/c there's ... so much of it is in other langs, it's very important for us to try to get representations in other lang;s which is one of the reason the boatrd is holding elections atain this summer; right now it consists of 3 people from the us, one from the uk, and one from france. it's likely that the lang constituency of the board is going to change before the end of summer. [comments about the origin of wikis, 1995, portland pattern repository] [Q: if I wanted to go and build a news site... how would I do it? ] amg: in order to go out and build wikinews, the first thing to do is to go out and build a community. <...> [ Q: is policy editable? ] amg: yes, anybody can edit. again, if it's not appropriate, it will get chantged back. if you try to change a policy, almost intstantly people wil jump in and say, nope, let's talk about it first. there's a great movement for consensus. if I wqanted to change the way articles are currently being reies... saying it's got t5o have approval of the admins, the community will override me. It's become sth of a joke: everything that I have personally suggested on wikinews has been shot down. I have not won a single poll. some of these things have eventually been agreed to gy the community... It's just the way the community works; there is noo respect for anybody 2who's an admin; admins are just serveants, the only thing they can do is clean up. [Q: how do you get to be an admin?] amg: you either voluntere for it, or someone puts you up for it. which is usually not a good thing... b/c you usually don't have time any more do to any writing. one of the things for me is: I like writing; I like writing articles. so I've actually revoked my admin a couple times... [Q: (unint) what do you do otherwise?] amg: I'm a dad. I'm a housedad. so... that's my main focus, is that. but I also do some internet consulting, and... you'll notice this orange bar? somebody has dropped a message on my personal userpage, which I can go and look at or not. everybody gets a userpage... it's not a big deal. it's mostly a way for people to get my attention, even thoyugh I don't want to give it to them. [[sj: that's me leaving a message...]] Down here, we have RfA. this person was suggested by dan100... a lot of people have supported him... but there is disagreement. he doesn't have a userpage about himself; some people feel that that doesn't mean he trusts the community. so he has n't become an admin yet. I mentiond there are a couple thousand editrs; this is how many admimns there are. not a lot, to handle... <...> we only meet online, primarily by talk pges. everya rticle on the website has a discussion page. on the website is wehre you'll find the most flamewars, or you'll find the most polite suggeestions, or whatever. it's a free-for-all[ [q: two questions. you say if there's a disagreement, the community 'talks' - does that happen off the site?] amg: no, we actually have listed... here's the water cooler (e.g.) you'll have a person, like this particular one is v upset b/c we're developing more policies than I think we need... he gets responded to furtehr down here by eloquence... then he responded... no... yeah. he responded, then I responded. paulrever jumped in craig jumped in a lot of people will get involved in each conversatio. you can break it up, but it's basically one long chain. it's not like a bboard... one of the things is that you can actually edit eachother comments. [Q2: if enough people were to get on this around the world, covering breaking news, local nes... could it serve as a kind of emerging [world news?] for something like the tsunami? ] amg: yes. during the tsunami... people juped on wikinews, and were using it as a distribution point for... q: I'm thinking more immediately; the tsunami took 9 hrs; right now, you have people on every minute, ever second; could it function more as ? amg: yes, it can. the top and bottom message on every page, I can change that. I could change it ery quickly to cover instant news. we have not been doing that, b/c we haven't developed a policy about how and when. there has been a discussion about ading a scroling ticker to the top here, which is possible... not very popo with our devs, since it would mean writing sth oin js, but they don't trust js, b/c it's not as secure in php... as soo as I change that (global js?] every page that gets served will have that information. if you see this blue line... that's the number of cache hits [[pronounced "kaysh"]] [26|23:13] "Amgine's naivete is stunning!" a cached hit is not being drawn out of the databsae. as soon a I changed the top, every page that's on wikinews will have to be recached [right] the main thing is <...> --- newsweek had a very important newspiece a few weeks back; it sparked a lot of rioting. wikipedia has a much larger newsreach than newsweek ever had. it suddenly occurred to some of the board members that if we 3ever announced somethign on wikipedia, it would have something of the same effect. right on the main page of wikipedia, we have news. In The News is arts on WP that have current events activities going on. That's the real reason why wikinews eventually got spun out; this started to tgake over a lot fo pepope's time, matiningin this section; some people anted it to be even more current than it is. if an announcement were to go up here, it might go out 1200 times a second to people all over the world. that became a worry; what if someon were to put up here that pres bush had launched nuclaer weapons? that would have a mjor effect all ovr the world... [Q: unint ... similar ? writing to journalistic...] amg: the vast majority of articles are 'aggregation' articles. someone goes out to find all the articles on a ucrrent event, and they creat an article. there is some original reporting, wher eyou go out and find other sources of iformatino; some original reporting where we go out and do the entire article. one that cam e up earlier today, on my way over here: there awas as trike here on cmapus. I was on my way over here, and didn'really have time to do a stoyr. but I did take a few picures and loaded them up. somebody else saw them anda dded text. somebody else went and found outher sources, other poeopla re doing this. That's how articles are developing rapidly. It's a lot better wiht more people. [Q: do you have any idea about ? spending so much time?] amg: they don't spend that much time... I spent two hours tgetting this up here (graphics?) other people spend 1 or 2 hours on one article, and that's it, that's all they do. right now there are X00 people who are active; 5 edits a month. but 2500 who have done edtits in the past 4 month. a lot of people doing just a few minutes here and there. [Q: are there people who... have people see them as experts?] amg: well, we have a lot of people who /are/ experts. who go in and fix articles. one thing that has fascinated me is wikispecies. they are going in and organizing core biology articles on wikipedia [[sj: Tree of Life project?]] many of these are biology experts; and they have the strangest arguments, and I have no idea what theyh're talking about b/c their jargon is so specific... [Q: ... experts; alright, poor choice of words. say I've read a book about this... I find every ref to octopus and mayke comments on it and sign.] amg: if you want to do an art about sth that's very imporatnt to you, and build yoruself up as a community eprson, nothing we can do to stop you from either editing an article on wp or creating an article on wnews, but if it isn't well-sourced... it won't get published. if you're quoting your book exclusively, that woudl be qwhat we call single-soucred, and it won't get published. one of the things about the process is we really want to be transparent. If I do an interview with somebody... I will actualy put up all of thet ext of that intervirew, so that others can look at it and say, "why didn't you develop that section of the interview? you didn't pull this quote out..." and that's happened. we also put up all the notes that people have. one of the arts thats omebody wrote that ended up sort of being and in'tl scoop that nobody cared about, was the release of openoffice in swahili. this wasn't big, big stories. but one thing that this did was, it allowd us , or the author, to do an interiew by email... [26|23:20] Hooray! and he just published what occurred in the email conv in his article. he asked 1questions and the other person would respond. it ws one way for him to get the information out. iving this person basically a free platform to say whatever he wanted about his product, but at the smae time allowed us to get some original information available to peopl.e all the source were listed [they are looking at it now?] and you can look at whatver is important to the article... we also usually includ a notes poage for orig reporting. here are the exact emails that were sent. [Q: if people put in ew information... say tomorrow there' s a story on this protest in oakland tribune, would they be able to ref another source as part of the wikinews art?] amg: yea. for isntance the narticle wer were lookgin at had a couple of diff sources... bascially we want to be able to show that we're not the only people reporting this. If I go over to kron (?) every factual statement will be supported etiehr here or in that other source. a press conf, e.g., if someone announce something and it was quoted in k-ron, we'd be able to take that. bujt if it was something from a private interview, we can' tuse that on wikinews. [q: wikipedia... if you have a controversial subject, how are those things handled?] amg: as carefully as possible. that particulary article was actualy the focus of a... a... softwaer by IBM called history flow [[flow!]] b/c it had the most fighting in that one particular article. I don't remmber exactly how many edtits, I believe its up to around 150 edits in the article. you'll notice it has a tag, 'disputed' it's not locked at the moment, it has been locked many many times, if you look at the discussion page, it will probably have a lot of archives; these are archives just of the arugments that have happened; and it oges on for days. [[canonical WP quote: "and it started a flame war that continues to this day"]] we try to get people to be polite to one another. neutrality and bias, that's our primary rule. NPOV... it's the one rule that can't be modified Good faith: people are not here to spread misinformation... but they still get into flames. by talking about what it is [ab] and not saying whether it's good or bad... adding value judgments is not what either proj is about if someone from the CC says that abortion is evil, we might say 'so and so from the christionan coal says abortion is evil' [Q: are you training people, other contributors or admins? have you discussed this issue?] amg: we don't do that; we've discussed it. what e do is make training articles available to people. you'll notice that ... links? on this site are blue. [many words] we try to make things clickable on. if I'm trying to do editing and getting involved, tehre are a lt of places to learn about it. new users... help... a huge number of diff things you can learn about. If you want to learn how to edit a page is one of the most im0portant ones. it also gives you place wher eyou can experient called the sandbox. this page does show you how to edit pretyt much everything. this page is also saved on meta.wikimedia, so all the projects can use it. it's a cross-project page. [Q: issue of how to use a wiki... also a second level of 'what is reporting' or whateve.r has this ever been the subj3ect of community discussion?] amg: def. the q of what is wn as a philosophical argument or discussion has come up a lot. and, guess what, we have a page about it. [which one?] <...> [Q: what if a pr person wrote a story about someone he was representing?] amg: if a pr person wrote a sotry well-sourced, yah, we'd run that. they very rarely get published b/c they're usually one person's point of view, and "trust me, everything is wonderful!" we never get a balanced [pov] [Q: what about an article about a cure for cancer, with multiple sources that are all pretty bad?] amg: well, if the so4ruces were bad, we'd probably cover it. if it's news, and we're covering it, someone else is probably also covering it. we're small potatoes; we're not the place where someone will come to release some brand new sort of thing. that said, it has happened. We had some scientists in massachusetts who decided that wikinews was the right palce to publish their article about the turing test... we had some scientsits come onto our site and yell at us for saying 'this is the first time such a test had been done'... it was funny, b/c there was original reporting, but there was a lot of research that had gone into it. [Q: If I'm thinking about getting into cit-jour, maybe settin gup a wiki, how would I go about that?] amg: well, I downloaded the wiki software just befrore my presentation, and installed it, and it looks like this: [shows] takes a couple minutes. you have to have mysql, and php. [26|23:32] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Simon's_Rock_College_tes ts_Alan_Turing_theories_with_'Imitation_Game'_experiment you ahve 0 articles, just a nice little page... [Q: does wn have a political leaning in any way?] amg: it doesn't right now... there is a tendency for people on the 'net to be more liberal. basically the larger the numbers of editors, the more are likely to be liberal. so I guess you can say we might have a bias in that direction... (conservative [here] meaning not interested in change, not interested for anyone's sake...) If you're liberal, you tend to be more interested in the community. thnis is community software; we have lots and lots of people; they all have a voice, and they all have a chance to change what we are doing. that's very 'liberal' but we're not politically liberal. we report on all of them... ... There is one thing I wanted to bring up. there was a comment earlier today: that "Journalism is reporting truth". wikinews isn't reporting truth. we report facts; we leave truth up to people who have a (religiuos or other) viewpoint, and we'll ascribe that veiwpoint. ... any other questions? [Q: since the wikinews proj started, what's the... how does it change the ? over what was anticipated initially?] amg: we've found that... getting moore people involved resulted in better and faster articles. b but we've also found taht over time we had a lot of quick development, but it's levelled off. this is how many people have been involved... who are activley contributing. in nov there were 30. in jhust may there were 346 active, involved. All told, there's a lot more than that; this is just on N. the number of new people is steadily falling. (people who've never edited before) other things are going up: the very active list is going up slowly but steadily. so... it depends on what you're looking at. arts growth in the last 2 weeks of dec/jan was 500%. we've never gotten over 100% since. <...> we don't have a license for example. we'd like a different license... the one we're working with creative commons to create is called cc-wiki; will allow most of cc-by and cc-sa licensure; but it's not available yet, it's in 0.5 testing. we're still working on legal things. technical things: we don't have an rss feed. (or not one that works the way we want to) and weh ave a vulnerability there we need to fix. wp seems to have gotten over that (initial) growh trequirement. [Q: almost every wp high-prop person I've met has an almost religious, fundamentalist belief in neutrl pov, neutrality. that that's what the wiki spirit is... on wp it's the same, on wn it's the same?] amg: it's a lot like that. we'r enot quite as religious about it, b/c we're a lot more cynical; there are a few people that are extemely evangelistic about it. we're a little less so... a personal opinion [of mine] [Q: one more question. what do you think is ? original? about it?] [26|23:43] The WIKINEWS JUGGERNAUT will CRUSH you all! amg: wn is diff from noews. more oriented toward a small local 'what are you interested in' approach the thing about it is, anybody can walk in and create a news article. small people in small towns have written articles taht have gotten published up on the main page, mainly b/c it's a good article. we don't have this reqq that you have to enter a 'secret society' (read: amg hates journalism school) to get it published. [mod to amgine: thank you very much! ] [fade out on voice: "how big is the database...?"] [that's all, folks!]