I’ve long been a huge fan and daily user of Wikipedia. When Wikinews was announced several months ago, I was a bit skeptical. I’m a big fan of do-it-yourself journalism, to be sure, but in terms of practicality I couldn’t see how the wiki was a good medium for news. But to be honest I never explored it very much.
Well, I just read this interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. I also finally took a look at Wikinews, where within 2 minutes I had read 3 very interesting, well written, and relevent stories that I hadn’t read anywhere else. Now I am a Believer.
Some excerpts from the interview:
One of the reasons we started it is that we noticed that Wikipedia itself, even though it is an encyclopedia, does a very good job of filling in background information on news reports.
We thought this type of energy could be applied to news as well. There’s an interest in writing more current events type of articles, but they aren’t appropriate for an encyclopedia, so we needed a place to put those, to direct that energy.
There’s no magic bullet to eliminate bias, and be objective and neutral. But what’s interesting about the way the wiki process works, and the openness of it, is that if you write something and you want it to survive the process, you have to write it in such a way that is broadly satisfactory to people of many points of view. That is a natural impetus to push you away from loaded terminology–or having an ax to grind in a story.
…what we can do very well is basically be another form of response to–and commentary on, in a certain sense–the mainstream media, just as blogs have become important. A very well-written, good blog is like a very well-written editorial column in a newspaper. Some of the top bloggers could easily be writing a syndicated column for…respected sources.
At the same time, bloggers are very often drawn to comment on the media itself. Such as being critical of how a story is being reported or digging into some facts that have been overlooked by the media. Things like that. I think we’ll also fit into that type of role but in different ways. The bloggers are the editorial page and response to the editorial pages, and we’re the response to the front page. We’ll synthesize what’s being reported in a variety of sources.
When asked what Wikipedia and Wikinews have taught him about people:
It’s really uplifting, actually. It’s amazing how many people, who even have very strong beliefs of their own, are able to cooperate in a friendly manner to get it right.
I’ve been on the Internet for a long time and participated in mailing lists and Usenet groups. Basically, what tends to happen in that type of environment is a lot of arguing. At some point, I realized that if I did something more productive than arguing with the same people over and over, I could probably have written three of four books by now.
I thought, gosh, it’d be nice if software existed to support us to work together. I may disagree with this person, but we have a lot of knowledge, and we may be able to present this issue in a way that will be helpful to others. Digging through our old e-mails is going to be a painful experience at best.
It’s amazing that it does work, and if you provide the incentive in the software that encourages people to cooperate rather than compete, then people can do amazing things.
Here is one place where I slightly disagree with Wales. Like seemingly everyone else commenting on the future of “news”, media, etc., Wales seems to think that the heros of one-way media aren’t going away anytime soon. Immediately after he claims this, he (in my opinion) contradicts himself by correctly describing the current media environment where two-way media are picking up steam and will begin to overwhelm traditional news sources.
The old broadcast model, in which an elite set of scribes sends out their thoughts to world–I don’t think it will ever completely go away, but it’s getting challenged by a more interactive model, in which communities come together to do things that fall somewhere in the realm that we traditionally thought the media do.
How that will work is a difficult question. But I definitely think that we’re already seeing that the media needs to respond to the blogosphere. Because certain stories break online or certain stories are undermined by people online, digging into the facts in a way that the traditional media either won’t–because of institutional biases–or, more often, can’t because of the expense of having 50 people pore over all the facts of any individual stories. It’s impossible. But the blogs do it.
i too love wikipedia!