Trend upwards

We hit an Alexa Ranking of 6,441 today, the general trend is upwards. However we've been up above 10,000 many times before, so expect it to drop 10k tomorrow.

Back to life

The writing contest has injected a new life into the wiki. Article count is now at 12/13 articles a day. A significant improvement on the 5 or so we had at the end of August. I'm still in shock after Amgines exit... but these things happen

What goes up... must come down

After a fantastic July when we had a 60% increase in articles, August was awful. Article count dropped 34% to just 254 articles. Back in March we were writing 100 more than that!

Despite the decreased output, readership and page impressions seem to be continueing there steady rise. I'm sure the new contest will give all our figures a lift.We will see very soon.

Wikinews has lost a part of itself

Amgine and Davodd have left Wikinews. These two contributors rank among our most influential and prolific. Davodd is a professional journalist and Amgine, who had been with Wikinews from Day 1, is a tech expert. It is a big blow and comes only a month or so after DV left. Dan and Nick remain at war. Paul is still spreading paranoia and conspiracy theories. The Ass Puss vandel is still alive and active. Story count is down. Activity is low. Country of the Week has stopped working.

And me... I was on holidays for two weeks and the place falls down without me!

Sorry

Sorry for my low activity lately at Wikinews. I've been very busy at work filling in for a co-worker (well she's actually my boss!), and even busier building my first ever website. Its called takeaway4you.com and hosts takeaway menus in Ireland. Currently I have about 325 menus up on it. I really need a bit of motivation... so if you can, click on one of the ad's please! I'll be back to the wiki as soon as I can (im going on holidays to Nice, France next week for a fortnight... so it will be a while!).

Too good to be true

After a surge in traffic after the London Attacks everyone was waiting for our Alexa ranking to fall back to earth. However day after day it stayed up... until yesterday when it finally plummetted to 24,929... we were at about 7,000 a week ago. Oh well at least everything else is moving along ok... no disputes, plenty of stories etc.

A very good day

We've hit two major milestones in the past few hours. We now have over 2,500 legitimate news articles and there has been in excess of 100,000 edits to the wiki since its foundation. 50,000 of these edits have been in the past 92 days alone. Thats 543 edits a day. Not bad, but I reckon at the moment we are hitting in excess of 700 edits a day... so we could hit the next milestone, 150,000 edits, in less than 70 days time... but of course by then hopefully we will have 1,000 edits a day!

Aside from these two milestones, wikinews now has over 3,365 registered users and a total of over 13,350 pages in the database. So things really do seem to be going well... and of course our Alexa ranking has stayed up after the London bombings.

Long live Wikinews!

Im back

I decided to give up my blog last month so I could focus on Wikinews - but I now think it would be a good idea to keep it as a distraction for myself - I don't wish to get to bogged down in Wikinews.

The 7/7 London bombings were a terrible tragedy - it might have been expected for a long time - but they still were shocking. The Wikinews team (its the first time in several months that I actually feel like we are a real team) responded like never before to the awful news - with Clare White on the ground in London to verify information wikinewsies from accross the globe came together to write quite literally a dozen excellent stories about the events; from several angles - the financial impact on the stockmarkets, the transport problems in the afternoon, the security alert in Scotland, the threat to Denmark and so on (not to mention the actual story about the inital bombings.)

Obviously we never rely on a single source - even with Clare around to verify info - so it was inperative that we use multiple sources to avoid bias or more importantly speculation, particularly at the early stages. The main story on the attacks actually was supported by 24 different articles. We gained a huge advantage over the traditional media by being among the first news sources to publish several photos from London after the bombings.

To put the whole thing (our coverage, not the bombings) into perspective we had a longer, more detailed article than Wikipedia for almost all the morning and most of the afternoon. We hit a new daily Alexa ranking record - 7,993, we got a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe, and hundreds of blogs gave us positive verdicts. I've welcomed about 100 new users to the site over the last few days. So far this month the top 7 most visted articles on Wikinews have been related to the bombings (number eight is about Bush falling off his bike... again).

2,000 articles

Despite all the bad news lately - we do have cause to celebrate at the moment, we have almost passed the 2,000 article milestone. We should pass it in the first half of this week.

Bad week at the office

Its been an awful week at wikinews! At the start of the week we had a major dispute involving Paul, Amgine, Dan and anyone who so much as made a slight remark about the dispute. The cause of the disagreement was Pauls apparent lack of NPOV and frankness. I must admit I did'nt help things in the previous week by banning him for breaking the 3-revert rule... but it got a whole lot worse this week with Amgine eventually banning him again and then Dan unbanning him.

If all this was'nt enough to damage the faith of even the strongest wikinews-beleiver (probably myself!), then a real shock was revealed to all, two of our best reporters quit! Alan, a former CNN employee, and DV, our key video stream developer. It was an horrible shock to everyone. DV cited a number of reasons for his departure, but my own speculation is that the recent spat of vandalism had hurt his emotions - he deeply loved the project and the constant vandalism may have damaged his belief in the project badly.

Sorry to be the prevayor of bad news, but another dispute occured in the latter stages of the week - Amgine and Simeon had a major falling out, cumulating in a banning war; Amgine banned Simeon, Simeon reverted and banned Amgine, Amgine reverted and banned Simeon... and thus forth for quite a period of time. In an entertaining (not for them, but for the rest of us!) spectacle, the pair had an open air argument in IRC.

Add slow servers, a power failure at wikipedia and a problem with images and the result is just two articles so far today... can't wait till this week ends!

Election special

I set up Story Preparation as a result of the Papal stories. It looks set to become a valuable Wikinews insitution. Uncle G has decided to make extensive use of it by been putting in a huge amount of effort on preparing for the British Elections. Hopefully it will all work like clockwork. To follow the election progress check out Results of 2005 United Kingdom General Election.

Up and Down

After a fantastic weekend, wikinews has died to just 3 stories today! The main culprit is the slowness of the site, users are struggling to get anything posted. On a much brighter note today I managed to make my 3,000 edit to Wikinews - interestingly it was a response to Jimmy Wales - my first time to talk to the man! The writing contest officially ended today - it resulted in over 220 articles being written!

Listen to Wikinews!

Thanks to Amgine and Ilya Wikinews is now available in an audio format! Working from the newly created ''Wikinews Audio'' section the pair have already released a pilot show (Ogg format, 9MB, 3minutes long) read by Amgine. It is truely a sign of our rapid growth that such endevours have already started to pop up. A video broadcast project is also in the works; with DV leading the way there. Truely exciting times!

French Wikinews

Having studied, but never mastered (or even close to master) the French language, i've decided to join Wikinews-fr to help improve my command of the language. And i've got to say it was a great idea! Its so much fun trying to read and write - and even think in another language.