Bulbanews foundations laid
Bulbagarden's wiki news service begins operations secretly
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Bulbanews, a wiki news service, is set up early Sunday morning, just under 7 weeks after Bulbagarden launched its first wiki site, Bulbapedia, community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
The Bulbanews logo
Although no Editor-in-Chief has been named, it is expected that evkl will take the position, in addition to his current editorship on Bulbapedia. Key contributors are expected to include Coronis and Murgatroyd; key technical contributors are expected to include Meowth346, Zhen Lin and new Bulbagarden staff member ChrisTheMaster.
An interview with Liam Pomfret, better known as Archaic, who proposed the concept, follows.
Interview with Archaic
This transcript has been lightly edited. The original transcript can be found at [1].
- Zhen Lin
- What is your vision of Bulbanews?
- Archaic
- That's a very good question, especially since my vision for it has seemed to change daily since I first started thinking seriously about the idea.
- I'd have to say that my vision is for it to become the hub of Pokémon news on the Internet. It goes without saying that this would involve getting the news out as fast as possible, and as accurate as possible, but also, I hope Bulbanews can present a more comprehensive news coverage than we've tended to see thus far.
- So instead of just the major news, and a few stories of interest only to the US fans, I'd like to cover literally everything related to Pokémon, from Pokémon competitions and promotions on cereal boxes and up.
- Zhen Lin
- That is quite a grand vision. How do you plan to achieve it?
- Archaic
- The wiki, and a large group of able reporters and editors. We can't expect to find out about all the small stories on our own, so those would need to be submitted, and the wiki format helps that greatly.
- Even if we do decide to prevent normal people creating articles directly, the speed of article creation on a wiki is much much greater than if we were expecting everything to be done manually, and we've got a lot more media options in wiki than we do for any other CMS I've tried before.
- There really hasn't been any way a news reporter could quickly update the accompanying website with all this wonderful content they've found out about before, but now, with the wikis on Bulbanews and Bulbapedia, it's possible.
- Zhen Lin
- Do you have any particular date in mind for revealing this project to the public?
- Archaic
- Not a specific date no, but rather, a specific news story. Thanks to Coronis and the wiki, Bulbanews should be able to bring out the latest CoroCoro Pokémon news, which should come out sometime around the 14th, before any other English language Pokémon fan site. Since it's expected to be some rather large news, I feel opening with that story would be best.
- Zhen Lin
- I see. Could you introduce the key figures of Bulbanews to the readers?
- Archaic
- There's so many people who have or will be contributing to the project that it's honestly hard to pick out specific people.
- If I had to identify key figures, I'd have to say Coronis, and of course, yourself. Without you, we would not have the wiki, and without Coronis, we would not have the rapid access to the latest news from Japan that this project will require.
- Zhen Lin
- I thank you, but really, I'm sure someone else could have done my part. Do you have any particular submission procedure in mind?
- Archaic
- At this point, we're still deciding on that. There are merits to having a viewable public "slush-pile" of submitted news that hasn't been looked over by our editors yet, however implementing it may be a little problematic, and it's unlikely that the slush-pile would be the place where major news breaks first either.
- It may be better to simply arrange for people to fill out a web form, or in the event of major news breaking, inform an editor via IM or our IRC chat room.
- Zhen Lin
- Indeed that seems more convenient. Well, thank you for your time, we'll be publishing this shortly.
- Archaic
- You're welcome.