Forum:SH Archive/The future of the Wookieepedia Newsnet

At the recent Mofference, the future of the Wookieepedia Newsnet was discussed (you can read the discussion in the log, starting at 04:19). However, no decisions were made and it was decided to discuss this in the SH instead, so, well, here we are. While I personally like the idea of a Wookieepedia-run blog, I don't think anyone can call the Newsnet active. Sure, there are WotM interviews every now and then, and recently Tope posted quite an interesting article, but mostly, it's just sitting there collecting dust. According to QuantCast, the Newsnet gets less than 2,000 pageviews per month. Compare this to the wiki itself &mdash; there were almost 900,000 pageviews on January 25.

I don't think it's in anyone's interest to retain the current approach. Something needs to be done, and as I see it, there are a few options.
 * 1) Nuke it completely. I don't think anyone wants to do this, but as it stands, the Newsnet is sadly quite unmaintained.
 * 2) Keep it where it is and promote it more. We can feature it more prominently on the Main Page as well as through our various social media outlets, including Twitter and Facebook. I'm sure we can find people who are willing to write articles for the Newsnet once in a while.
 * 3) Integrate the Newsnet's function with either the wiki or our social media.
 * 4) Wiki approach: We could consider if the Newsnet could be integrated with the WookieeNews section.
 * 5) Social media approach: Post articles on FB etc.
 * 6) An on-wiki blog. Now, when you hear the words "Wikia blog", you probably shudder, but hear me out on this. What I'm suggesting would be an approach where only admins/certain editors that belong to a news team or something could post blogs. This would eliminate the loads of noob blogs and similar that other wikis with blogs are dealing with. In addition, commenting would be restricted to registered users (probably auto+emailconfirmed). Rollbacks and admins would be able to remove blog comments that don't belong. I'm actually kind of interested in seeing whether this approach could work.