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Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Finnish Wikinews

< Proposals for closing projects

This is a proposal for closing and/or deleting a wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is subject to the current closing projects policy.

The proposal is rejected and the project will be kept open.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

There is very little content on this Wikinews.

I know in your guideline “Inactivity in itself is no valid reason”. However in your guide you later also state “inactivity may become a valid reason.”. In case of Wikinews keeping touch with occurrences is highly relevant aspect. After all who would read newspapers if they were only published about biyearly and even then news were 3 years old. Compared with other Wikimedia projects (such as Wikiversity and Wikiquote) this viewpoint of keeping up with times is pertinent.

I propose that current Finnish Wikinews content is transferred to Finnish Wikisource (Wikiaineisto) and after that Wikiuutiset would be permanently deleted.

This type of era of stagnation should be abolished. Abilation (talk) 21:18, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I also dropped notice at WMFI talk page. Note that I am having no time on actually commenting this. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 15:21, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I know that projects are very rarely closed/deleted for inactivity, but is it useful just to keep project open and hope that some day someone will come there and start contributing? My personal opinion is that Wikinews should be a multilanguage project, and not having many sublanguage projects. Finnish Wikinews doesn't serve any value as it's been many years dead. Stryn (talk) 15:37, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree totally. Even if the project was active, in the era of fake news, nothing is less trustworthy and useful than a news site updated occasionally by random people from the proverbial street. Kotivalo (talk) 06:46, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree as well, as can be seen on the main page, the last piece of "news" is almost two years old. The projet does not serve its purpose and promises to keep it active and developing have been proven to be empty. --MiPe (talk) 17:06, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Fully reserving the right to comment on the proposal as a whole, why would you place the content in Finnish Wikisource? Would it not be more appropriate to put it in Incubator in case anyone decides at a future point to reincarnate the project? StevenJ81 (talk) 17:13, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It could be placed to Incubator all as well – it doesn’t make much of a difference to me. As long as content is available in one service where it can be looked. Only thing that comes to mind in favour of Finnish Wikisource is higher visibility of the content. --Abilation (talk) 18:48, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Inactivity is not a valid reason for closure. To handle this, I would propose doing something similar to what what Norwegian Wikinews did (saying the wiki is inactive, but leaving it open for anyone who wants to revive it). DraconicDark (talk) 18:56, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Strong support from me. It needs to be closed down. J.K Nakkila (talk) 07:14, 4 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But why does it need to be closed down? A vote should be more than just a support or oppose. DraconicDark (talk) 20:47, 8 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Comment It seems to me that there are two possible solutions going forward:

  • Close project and export to Incubator (close to the original proposal, but Incubator is a more appropriate target than Finnish Wikisource)
  • Soft close (similar to what was done with Norwegian Wikinews, as DraconicDark mentioned above)

Both of those get to a similar place de facto. That is: project is in stasis, waiting for someone in the future interested in reviving it, but in the meantime a front page that is woefully out of date is not out there grabbing attention.

On the whole, LangCom would prefer the second approach. It's a lot of work to close a project, transfer its contents, and then possibly to reverse the process at some point in the future. The second approach simply puts things in stasis, but allows the infrastructure to remain intact for someone to use in the future.

Question Question: My consequent question, for User:Abilation and anyone else wishing to comment: Is there a reason that in this case the first approach is superior? StevenJ81 (talk) 13:10, 17 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In case you meant “Close project versus Soft close” —I’m not personally in favour of soft close. It would just leave a zombie site afloat.--Abilation (talk) 13:15, 17 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Requesting input from User:Ilmaisin, who is evidently not around much, but is listed as a sysop on this project. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:01, 17 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Regrettably I have to agree that there does not seem to be enough populace of contributors for this project to be viable. Some kind of archival or "soft closure" would probably be appropriate. --ilmaisin (talk) 17:22, 17 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrative changes to proposal

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On behalf of LangCom, I am making some changes to this proposal, without prejudice to its ultimate outcome:

  • Restructuring as a closure request, rather than a deletion request. LangCom almost never agrees to project deletions. The projects deleted effective November 2017 were unusual in a variety of ways, but cannot be taken as precedents. I can assure you that this project would not qualify for deletion at this time.
    Look at projects that were transferred to Incubator, like b:uz:. They are normally locked and then left in place.
Accordingly, I am moving the discussion in full to Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Finnish Wikinews, which is the conventional way to name these pages. I am leaving redirects in place so that the links on fi: and n:fi: continue to work.
  • I am changing the proposed action to "Copy to Incubator".

I did not change the other links above; I only reformatted them. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:29, 17 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Continued discussion

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  • Comment Comment - If there's not enough activity to keep the project going, then "soft close" or "move to Incubator" would be good for me. George Ho (talk) 06:12, 27 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

    I'm not sure how to respond to the "zombie site afloat" comment, though I admit that there may be some potential vandalism. Nevertheless, there is the lock system, so editing access can be configured, depending on how much a page is edited. --George Ho (talk) 06:28, 27 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Soft close

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You may notice at PCP that LangCom has not actually approved a project closure since 2013. Remember that "Type 1" closure requests historically were for projects that either (a) had little content added since they were created, and/or (b) were so loaded with spam that there was little point in trying to maintain or rescue them. Closure requests of type (a), other than Wikinews requests, have long since been dealt with. And the automated systems in place to protect wikis from spam have effectively eliminated type (b) requests.

Wikinews is a little different, of course, because (a) if its main page becomes stale, it looks embarrassing, and (b) history has shown that the automatic systems to protect wikis sometimes leave Wikinews front pages still looking like a mess. So what to do about it?

The idea of the "soft close" seems to handle the situation adequately from LangCom's perspective. LangCom on the whole tries to look to the possibility of a future revival of a wiki. We can envision that happening in a couple of different ways:

  • Move everything out to Incubator, lock the current wiki, and then when a wiki is ready for revival move it back to its original location
  • Simply leave everything in place awaiting a revival

The first approach requires a lot of work at both ends of the process that is avoided by using the second approach. And if the argument is that there is nothing worth rescuing at the front end of the process, we would argue that the bulk of the work is taken up in moving infrastructure (templates, modules, etc.) back and forth, and that surely needs to happen. So in this respect we see the second approach as getting us to the same place at the end of the day, with less work.

There were once two downsides to the second approach. First, if we were still concerned about projects becoming spam magnets, we wouldn't want that to happen. Mostly, that's not an issue any more. Second, and still an issue, is that this approach leaves old and embarrassing main pages as a window from the world to the project. And it's for that reason that we use a "soft close" instead.

In the soft close, we simply hide the front page. Instead, we announce that the project is currently inactive, but that people are welcome to try to revive the project if they wish. That immediately hides the embarrassing front page, and also explains why people who then go inside the project to explore it see only old information. The model we are proposing is the one used in Norwegian Wikinews. The approach used in Swedish Wikinews, in our view, discourages revival of the project.

@Abilation @Ilmaisin, since you are still listed as administrator on this project, and since the main page is still fully protected, we would therefore like to ask you to do the following:

  1. Move your main page to a different location. Even a subpage of its original location will work.
  2. Create a new main page in the original location. It should basically look something like the current main page of Norwegian Wikinews:
    • You don't need two versions; those exist because of the Bokmål vs. Nynorsk issue in Norwegian.
    • An English-language version you can work from is the first version of that page in the history.
    • The page should include (1) a link to this discussion page on Meta, and (2) a link to the moved location of the old main page.

Thank you in advance for doing that.

If anyone has any further questions, please let me know. For LangCom: StevenJ81 (talk) 16:36, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

additional signature to activate new ping. Apologies for error. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:27, 2 July 2018 (UTC) [reply]
User:Abilation is not an admin there, but User:Ilmaisin is. Haluatko tehdä yllä mainitut toimet? Stryn (talk) 16:52, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Locking the wiki (preventing editing from anyone but stewards) is rather simple and straightforward. Is this being sought here as well? I can prepare a patch real quick to do so. I agree there's no need to move stuff to the Incubator in this case. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 16:58, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No. We are not locking. We are leaving this as a soft close. We are handling this the same way we handled Norwegian Wikinews in November 2017. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:25, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Okey dockey. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 17:30, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  Done --ilmaisin (talk) 20:37, 4 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. For LangCom: StevenJ81 (talk) 22:49, 4 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]


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