Personally, I believe Wikinews is what truly separates us from the rest of the Wikimedia community, we're willing to publish a story even if it's bad against our mother foundation and our founder. It truly is being NPOV, instead of covering it up and not publishing it, we're publishing it, and if we did cover it up, which would be bad due to the fact there's controversy over Jimbo's Wikipedia article anyways embellishing some of the earlier history, we bring it to the forefront and some user would have started the story anyways. Wikinews is the news arm of the Wikimedia community, but at the same time we're the ombudsman/public editor, we're not afraid to report something that will affect negatively, weither it be Benoit story, the leak of the finicial documents or this.
Yes financial is spelled wrong, I know. But that's my opinion, it's gossipy, but we have a right to report what we think is news.
Other's were more critical of the article we posted despite the fact it had already received mainstream press attention.
This is not exactly an atmosphere that fosters cooperation between the Wikipedia volunteers...-Anonymous poster
One poster called us hypocritical:
I find it really interesting how people would get together to do stupid things ! I don't know either of them but I know that this guy is wikipedia's founder, so he demands respect from all of us, I don't know allot about the journalist except her wikipedia page (and actually I don't want to put any more time in that) but it shows that she has a not-very-good history with her ex boyfriends. I'm not trying to judge anyone, what I'm trying to say is ..."DON'T YOU HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO ?" why do we always want to bring good people down, and this is also for the wikipedia committee, were you really arguing about a "steak house" bill !!! really ?! I thought you all were more mature than that !
Before you all end up somewhere where you don't want to be, think for a second about what you are doing ? & what is it leading to ? is it really worth it to make all this fuzz about someone's relationship, which is more important, fixing the biased article (if any) or sitting there and making a story of it ! If he really did something wrong, then apply the appropriate penalty, just get it done with instead of feeding all those failure-monger people out there !
I apologize for my strong language, but this was the last thing I would expect from wikipedia, thanks.
Michael Tadros
Meanwhile, others called it gossip and not being worthy of news:
Wikinews : The source for news about Jimbo's sex life.-Anonymous IP address---==---
One final note is this post from an Anonymous IP suggesting people should make their donations conditional.Point of view? How about relevance? Or respect? Speaking as someone completely outside the Wikimedia community (NPOV, right?) I think that to post what is little more than tawdry gossip about anyone is conduct unbecoming of a news source--not that it ever stops anyone, I just thought this community would be better than that. To claim NPOV by throwing some Wikimedia folks to the wolves occasionally is pretty pathetic too IMHO.
Not news.
-Victor "StarSeeker" Sheckels
If you want to support the Wikimedia Foundation's projects financially, but you're suspicious of whether staff travel benefits the public, one solution is to put a condition on your donations, saying they can only be used to buy, upgrade, maintain, repair, power and colocate servers and associated equipment, and/or buy bandwidth. That's what I'm doing in my will; if the conditions aren't met, my money instead goes to my mom.
Chime in, folks.
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