The Wikinewsie blog - what is and is not appropriate.

This email was prompted by a rant from Jason which I have heavily edited and am still not particularly happy about. I have my very personal ideas about what the blog should be like and his post does not fit with them.

First and foremost, I’m going to violate RFC 1855. If you don’t know what that is then go look it up. It should be required reading for every single individual accessing the Internet.

DO NOT TREAT THE BLOG AS A SOAPBOX!

It is not a venue for vicious verbiage, nor a platform for caustic criticism. Nothing done by third party sites should be reported on it; it is for commenting in a thoughtful and considered manner on the mechanics of working on Wikinews, on issues arising from articles on Wikinews, and issues surrounding that. Digg? I don’t care. I didn’t spend hundreds of dollars to give people a platform to diss them. If you want to judge Digg harshly, they are simply a site that relies on crowdsourcing to get people to provide their content for little work on their part so they can *sell adverts*. There’s a pretty diagram illustrating that somewhere on the Internet, it has a box labeled “Website” surrounded by lots of little bubbles labeled “sucker”.

If you’re going to post a new article on the blog, then ask yourself would a respectable site like the BBC run your post? They have an Editors’ blog too, read it, see how they approach the issue, see what they consider acceptable and *professional*.

Brian McNeil