CGorman's Wikinews Blog

Trend upwards

2005-09-19T21:49:00.000+01:00

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

2005-09-16T22:18:00.000+01:00

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

2005-08-30T11:05:00.000+01:00

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

2005-08-26T20:54:00.000+01:00

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

2005-07-30T23:30:00.000+01:00

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

2005-07-19T14:49:00.000+01:00

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

2005-07-13T12:20:00.000+01:00

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

2005-07-09T20:03:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-22T18:23:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-13T20:08:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-05T22:00:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-02T20:13:00.000+01:00

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!

2005-04-28T21:07:00.000+01:00

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

2005-04-23T15:57:00.000+01:00

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.

Growing Pains

2005-04-22T23:59:00.000+01:00

Wikinews has begun to slack off, article numbers have halved on most days to about ten and in general the place has slowed down. So today I made a promise to myself - to write 5 articles! I managed it no problem, imagine if ten people had done the same today, we easily have ten good committed writers.

Oh well, maybe im delierious, but I think we can really make Wikinews work, our Papal coverage proved us to the reader, but we cannot sit back on past successes, we most continue to improve the overall quality and depth of our coverage.

BTW: Country of the Week has had a wee bit of an overahaul, take a look.

IRC

2005-04-21T22:31:00.001+01:00

On Monday of last week, i'd never used IRC in my life - I knew noting about it. Today less than two weeks later im addicted to it! The wikinews channel is absolutely wonderful; it is so useful for cordination. Whilst talking with Amgine (several times) he has been able to instantly warn me of a vandel attack, and i've been able to respond instantly. Without the IRC channel that would have been impossible. There is a recent changes channel as well that alerts people to changes in real time. Its all so great!

IRC

2005-04-21T22:31:00.000+01:00

First on the new Pope

2005-04-20T21:22:00.000+01:00

Wikinews was one of the first news outlets to get the Papal election result up on it's mainpage. Thanks to Dan100's quick reaction and my prepared story, we beat the Associated Press, BBC and CNN! Hopefully we can work so well in the future!

Vandalism

2005-04-17T18:01:00.000+01:00

Wikinews has been hit by a spat of vandalism lately. One vandel in particular comes several times everyday and posts ''Ass Pus'' on several main page templates. We have reverted and baned so many time, but he's not detered. Apparently he's been doing the same to other wikis for months now.... looks like we are in for the long haul!

Back on track

2005-04-13T23:27:00.000+01:00

Due to some healthy competition with the poles we had 22 stories today... though they managed over 25!

Poor news day

2005-04-12T22:44:00.000+01:00

Its been an awful day at Wikinews - at 22:00UTC there were just 6 stories published - the lowest count in months... i've since added a few, but more are needed.

50,000 edits

2005-04-11T22:13:00.000+01:00

Wikinews passed the 50,000 edit mar k today!

Nigeria

2005-04-09T12:42:00.000+01:00

Country of the Week has gotten off to a great start with 4 articles about Nigeria written during the week. This is certainly an improvement from zero written in the previous five months!

Elsewere the introduction of DPL (Dynamic page listing) has made the wikinews issue and regional pages much easier to update.

Unfortunatly after breaching the 10,000 daily rank mark earlier in the week, we've fallen back to 37,000th place according to Alexa.

Looking on the brightside, based on the first 7 days of April, we are on course to produce 545 news articles this month! That would easily beat my prediction of 512 articles/44.5% growth!

Story Preparation

2005-04-02T19:18:00.000+01:00

In response to efforts to prepare a stoy for the Popes death i've started Wikinews: Story Preparation. There we can start work together on stories for planned and expected future events.

Also today the site achieved its 2nd highest ever Alexa Traffic Ranking at 9,851! Keep it up everyone!

Modelling Wikinews' Growth

2005-04-01T19:16:00.000+01:00

Taking a leaf from the Wikipedia book i've started a page called Modelling Wikinews' Growth which is a place to make wildly optimistic predictions about Wikinews' future growth. Based on current growth rates, we should be producing 51 articles a day by December 2005! Oh and this blog entry is the 2,000 time Wikinews has been mentioned in a blog (as listed by technorati).

Country of the Week

2005-04-01T19:12:00.000+01:00

I've created Country of the Week at Wikinews to help eliminate Western bias from the project. Its been well received thus far - but it remains to be seen how it will actually do in practice. The first country selected is Nigeria which currently has zero articles written about it. Please join!

Breaking News

2005-03-28T19:11:00.000+01:00

I might have moaned about Amgine in my last post - but I must give praise where praise is due. Between Amgine and Silsor, Wikinews had the Asian Earthquake story less than 62 minutes after the event itself! We were just as quick as the major news sources.

Shot down by Amgine

2005-03-28T17:19:00.000+01:00

I knew Amgine whould disagree with my wiki links policy proposal! Thankfully we came to a compromise (I think!) that we're both satisfied with. Elsewhere Amgine became the 5th person to drop out of the Wikinews Writing Contest. Hopefully the remaining 8 will battle it out till July or later! The contest has indeed boosted traffic levels by a good bit.

Wiki Links

2005-03-27T19:18:00.000+01:00

I've made a suggestion on Wikinews: Policies, please support it!

Lots of news!

2005-03-26T15:07:00.000Z

It seems to be a great day for news today - there's 19 stories for today on the main page - and its only 15:09! At this rate we could have up to 40 by the end of the day!

Main Page

2005-03-25T22:05:00.000Z

Davodd, The Bellman, Eloquence and Ilya have been busy today tweaking the main page. They've certainly made it look much more professional. Theres now three lead stories, a clear devision down the page and basically a sharper look to it. Only one quibble though - the first thing a user see's is Welcome to Wikinews, a free-content news source that you can edit! - I think the a should change to the - we are aiming to be the definitive news source on the web.

Argument

2005-03-25T16:41:00.000Z

An argument has startedabout changes to Wikinews' main page. Several administraters altered the page format last night - but one writer Paulrevere2005 claims that there should have been more consultation.
On another matter, the Wikinews Writing Contest is becoming a huge success, the website now has over 1145 articles and its Alexa Page ranking has soared.

Gotta start somewhere...

2005-03-25T16:19:00.000Z

I've watched the rise of the blog for the past year with interest. Never thought i'd write one, but things change. Anyways this blog will hopefully chart the progress of Wikinews from its small beginnings - to world domination. Basically this blog is a place for all my rants. Anyways we'll see do I get past day 2 without getting fed up!