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Re: Posting news on dot.kde.org only for chosen?
by Dre on Tuesday 05/Mar/2002, @10:10
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Hi,
There is indeed a problem with feedback to rejected submissions, but the problem stems primarily from the fact that we are all extremely busy and there are a lot of submissions we feel are inappropriate. At other times, it may not be the case that the reason for a rejection can be explained properly, mainly b/c things involve value judgments and it takes a lot of time to draft a proper "official" response.
There are of course some people who advocate that a computer program do the submission review - that somewhere we should post a "formula" and apply it consistently to all submissions, so that somehow there is no editorial judgment involved. This view is completely unrealistic, and though you may find the occasional site that attempts to post a submission policy, if you compare the policy with the accepted and rejected items (the latter being much harder to locate), you will find that there really isn't much point to it.
At least from my perspective, and I am just one editor of many, the broad outlines, which should be so obvious as not to need posting, are that:
(1) they are related to KDE
(2) they are news
(3) they are likely to be of interest to a broad base of our readers; bonus points if they are likely to generate discussion
(4) they are within the confines of the purpose of the site (so generally we do not accept third party press releases, such as application releases, since appsy exists for that purpose; however, application reviews are much more interesting, and you can see from the KDE.de App of the Month series and stories on some other published reviews, particularly in non-Linux media, that we do accept such submissions)
(5) they are responsible journalism
In your case, we decided not to post the story b/c it would be viewed as "biasing" the poll. Our general policy is not to announce polls that involve KDE unless necessary to compensate from an announcement elsewhere. Unlike some, I believe that polls should be unbiased and the dot should not be used as a vehicle to draw people to a poll that would otherwise not run across it. This would be item (5) above. I realize that others will disagree with this policy, but the one and pretty much only benefit of being the one that actually does the work, is that your opinion counts for more :-).
It's not clear to me, anyway, that the existence of a poll is even news (item (2) above). There are many sites that have a daily poll. I personally don't think polls are news. Of course, the results could be, so please let us know when they are ready :-).
Anyway, one thing people forget is that the Dot itself is an Open Source project. We have maintainers, who work for free in their spare time, to create a site that KDE users will find useful and interesting. In fact, the site was started by Navindra and myself (actually we were working simultaneously on two different sites, as we both felt a news site was needed, and when I found out about Navindra's efforts I asked to join him and he cordially agreed), but there are a large number of other editors involved, or with the ability to get involved, in the project.
When you think of the site as an Open Source project, managed by volunteers who are very busy with other things as well, a lot of issues are hopefully clearer. Just like I cannot demand that company A or developer B include feature Y in their Open Source product - or that they "publish" their paradigm for including or not including features, under the assumption that if somehow my feature request fits inside this published paradigm the company or developer has an *obligation* to include it - nobody can demand that the dot does anything. The dot is not a monopoly, there are a million websites in the world you can publish news, many of which get far more traffic than this site. FreeKDE.org is a fine example of a site which was launched because Neil was dissatisfied with our editorial policies. People interested in commercial products know where the website is. This is KDE's website, so the news is principally about KDE.
What's important to consider is that if you look at the biggest opponents of our editorial policies -- which, frankly, are Shawn and Neil -- they are on exact opposite sides of the spectrum, or at least it seems to me. There is no way to please everybody. I try to do my best job for the site. At this I and the other editors may fail at times, but overall, I think we do a great job here, and the success of the site speaks for itself.
That said, I do not mean to say the site can't use a facelift. For example, I would like to see a "subsection" of the part where stories which are in fact arguably stories (i.e., ignoring trolls and the many tech support questions we get) which are not approved by the editors (i.e., unmoderated, except to remove trolls) are listed, and having a list of current threads on the right side of the main page. I would also like to see "KDE PR" section where companies can post press releases, and these can also be seen in a sidebar. And of course there are other things I would like to see, like user moderation so that we don't have to yank obvious trolls. My problem is, I don't know, or care to learn, Python, so I have not seriously suggested these ideas, perhaps other editors agree with them or not.
As to the future, the site may be migrating to PHP (which my "original" site was based on, before I joined with Navindra), in which case I can contribute quite a bit more code for improvements, since, well, I have a lot of PHP code.
Hope this answers some questions. I am very busy the next few days so please accept my apologies if I ignore this thread from here on out.
Dre |
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