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Wikinews Project Launched
Eloquence writes "The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other wiki-based projects, has just launched the English and German editions of Wikinews, a free news-source created collaboratively by volunteers around the planet. See my article Wikinews and the Growing Wikimedia Empire for more on this and other recent developments in the Wikimedia world."
compared to when you take a look at this interesting take on the future of news and media delivery:
http://www.letitblog.com/epic/
more at 11.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Wiki Project is evolving! That is awesome news. Heh News, mayber I should read some of that...
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
I submitted this story like 5 days ago but it was rejected, nothing personal, yeah right. Anyway, there's a Wired article talking about this with the creators, here's the link:
. html?tw=wn_story_top5
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65819,00
Although, the Web does have some of this functionality already (anyone can publish), a central site would be excellent, especially for those of us in the US who realizes that a world exists outside the border and are sick of receiving less than a bare minimum of news from it.
I wonder how a project such as this would handle things such as libel? Would the operators of the site or the original poster be responsible for that type of thing? IANAL and I don't really know.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Good luck, Wiki-folk. As long as it doesn't degenerate into a high-noise free-for-all, like, uh, Usenet or /. :)
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Is that news gets old fast and is delivered fast. If someone edits an article on a popular sites, say CNN and people see on the front page 'Terrorists Bomb L.A., alot of people are going to get frightened and panic before it noticed and removed. Let's hope it doesn't come that far.
Sounds like a perfect forum for people to push their news thru their own agendas and slants.
I have read numorous reports about the credibility (or lack thereof) and about the bias of some of Wikipedia's articles. If Wikipedia launches a news service, I think there is an even greater opportunity for individuals to interject their personal opinions into things that many people believe as the truth. If anyone can submit a news story, there will be many biased or one sided stories. Wikipedia tries to avoid this in its main encyclopedia by hoping that other users will correct any biases in the articles. With news however, it is often not enough time to go through and check each fact. I don't think that Wiki can rely on user editing to insure "fair and balanced" stories.
Cease your hegemonic discourse.
Will this incite editing wars on controversial topics? The open nature of wikipedia is great because historical events have already been scrutinized and understood. Distance lends perspective. Current events are much more subject to an author's personal bias, and the individuals most motivated to put their opinion out there often have the most radical viewpoint.
considering that wikipedia's content is distorted to hell and back by varying trolling factions; I think that reading tea leaves might prove to be a more reliable news source than what's being proposed.
In the discussions setting it up, "not becoming Indymedia" was definitely an explicit goal of the initiative.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sounds like what GE, Disney, Viacom, and Newscorp, and Time-Warner do, huh?
You do realize that from within the United States you may load such websites as news.bbc.co.uk, don't you? I think Wikinews will be interesting, but it's hardly the first online source of non-US news.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am still waiting for Wikip0rn!
please take note, site has been compromised and is displaying the always disgusting hello.jpg.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello.jpg
I can understand that there's not much need to recognize authorship in something like a science textbook, but for a news site, it is essential.
What I think wikinews needs, and indeed all wikis, is authorship so we can see who said what. If we implement something with PGP signatures, people can build reputations over time, and newcomers can filter out information from authors with no rep.
Imagine freelance journalists posting credible, signed reports to wikimedia outlets from warzones, political protests, etc. No editors, no goverment censors. It would be great!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Nice troll, btw. Anyway, censorship is a Bad Thing. When I look at news.google I am usually looking for multiple views about a news topic. I value confilicting reports as it adds information that I trust myself to compare and evaluate. I'd rather think for myself than have Yahoo or anyone else do it for me.
stuff
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but the US and Europe ain't the World. There's also, you know, the others. They may be poorer, but that doesn't make them any less important. So drop the "western rulez!" shit.
It's funny ~and~ sad at the same time! Someone will end up doing this just to get their name on the Wiki!
Agile Artisans
Wikipedia will have a booth at the Southern California Linux Expo this February. Might be a fun place for Wikipedia contributors to get together at chat! You can get a free expo hall pass by using the promo code 'free' on the SCALE website. Another option is a discounted full-access pass, which gets you into all the talks etc, by using the promo code 'wiki'
...just mirror Indymedia. They've even done all the hard work of attracting the troll community for you.
or slam America everything will be just fine :D
If anything, distortion of the news is a factor of success.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
MediaWiki software stores the nick of everybody who contributed to an article, and any user can extract diffs to see who contributed what.
Wikinews may be useful, but only as a useful sidebar to the news. This is for two key reasons:
(1) The author's bias - at least we know the slant of CNN, FoxNews, CBS, etc. News is subjective, and even more so when it is a random person out there in cyberspace.
(2) Original news gathering - Will they have the budget? Is the quality of coverage everywhere going to be the same?
This is like blogs, in terms that it will end up being uneven. Useful for commentary, but not for original news gathering. This is a good idea, but it is not the next evolution of news! The 'official' news sources have their flaws, but its the devil we know.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
I think this isn't as good for up-to-date news as it will be for keeping people updated on old news. Many news stories have further developments (such as the suicide bombing delivery pizza man from last September) that are impossible to find on mainstream news. I hope it will be soon in showing that this functionality will prove worthwhile.
I've just discovered the joys of Wikipedia in the last 2 months, and I use it all the time now, I wonder how I ever got along with out it.
These guys have the right idea, and I think it may be nothing short of a revelotionary way to spread information on the internet. I hope that it is as sucessful as google news.
I wonder if Googlenews and this new wiki news will cross refrence eachother.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Most of the developed news stories are days old, and I even spotted on article written in the style of a encyclopedia entry.
This is gonna be like indymedia when they were going through their "We can't moderate, that would be authoritarian and fascist" phase a few years ago. Oh well, at least I'll get to see what Bobby Meade, Deaf Messanger is up to these days
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Where's the RSS feed?
Wikinews explicitly allows original reporting, making it somewhat similar to Indymedia, while adhering to a strict Neutral Point of View policy.
That is a real shame. Personally, i was looking forward to doing some http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S_Thompson GOZO REPORTING...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Speak for yourself, goon! I'd say you're a closet McKinleyite if you're not willing to admit that the most important election of the 19th century was stolen by that blasted benevolent assimilationist! It's obvious the election was stolen using those new-fangled ink pen ballots manufactured by Ye Olde Diebold. At least one citizen understood that you can cast a vote with a piece of cold steel much more effectively than you can with a ballot!
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
A long time ago, I started my wiki, with the goal of just being a place where people would go to add their knowledge.
Consider that you've never heard of my wiki, and you have heard of wikipedia.
So clearly the Wikimedia people did something right. How did they get to this point? What sort of "marketing" did they do? Did they have some group of dedicated editors who started it off with a couple hundred quality articles? What was their magic sauce for making something so cool that's now so popular?
fifth sigma, inc.
The Nightly News doesn't generate propaganda? Every aspect of every story in some way is shaped by the reporter (and/or megacorp) reporting on it... that will be the case regardless of if you get your news from CNN or from someone from half-way around the world.
But it sounds as though you'd rather have every aspect of the news shaped by mega-corporations who have (shock!) corporate and political agendas. Yes, Wikinews is a perfect forum for people to push their news through their own agendas and slants... but guess what? So is ANY NEWS ORGANIZATION! It seems that you believe that people in general are capable of generating misinformation and inaccurate reports, but the giant news megacorps are not...
Tinfoil Hat
Dude, must be some form of subliminal propaganda!
Anyway, because news IS entertainment, every story is, in some way, given a spin. Never trust any news source.
(Dude, where's my tinfoil hat?)
And how do I know if its true? This wiki fad might be useful for things like software manuals(We use them at Gentoo to let the end user help take a lot of the weight off our (the developers') shoulders, and it works quite well. Its easy to weed out the errors[of which there usually are] before we encorporate them into the actual gentoo docs), but using a wiki for news really strikes me as odd. I really have trouble trusting sites like wikipedia for things such as history, even if their technology articles seem to be a little less inaccurate.
The Television Wiki
http://discussion.brighthand.com/showthread.php?&t hreadid=113893
A distributed news-gathering organization -- a kind of open-source AP or Reuters -- is an interesting idea. But until they actually have reporters all over the world, I'll keep getting my news from institutions that do.
http://www.indymedia.org These people do a great job of this already. There are places like:
...that give direct information about South Africa or Portland, respectively. Thanks for your time and take it easy.
southafrica.indymedia.org
-or-
portland.indymedia.org
I've been looking for an independent "grassroots" news service for a while, and I tried to follow Indymedia. I found it not only to be extremely messy (what sites should I go to?), but also extremely leftist, often opinionated to the point of not being "news" at all, and too often (for my taste) covering anti-globalization demonstrations (there must be other important things going on in the world).
Then I found Free Republic, and it was just as opinionated, only to the opposite extreme of the political spectrum.
I've been an avid user and sometimes contributor to Wikipedia for over a year, and I'm thrilled to see them launch Wikinews. Perhaps I have finally found what I was looking for?
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
This is complete bullshit!!! how can we be sure that the news there is objective? How accurate is it? Wikimedia should make a service like news.google.com which crawls newssites, and automatically generates content.
Since the main article right now seems to be goatse.
it has no resemblance to google news. google news just aggregates storys on traditional media sites and creates a main page. wikinews actually creates the content itself.
tasty electronic music vittles
Why do I think its doomed to fail?
Because when I loaded it at work 30 seconds ago the front page contained a famous image... the goatse.cx guy...
Doomed to fail.
The idea sounds interesting, but after checking it out I wonder if wikinews is really the correct name for it. I could very easily see this evolving into something more akin to a wikiblog.
I read 4 articles and without exception, they were atrocious. Say what you want about the NY Times, WaPo and others, they produce a high quality product that consumers have come to expect.
And these articles just don't cut it.
The 4 I chose have all completed "peer review" and they all read like a high school newspaper.
And they're literally "no name" authors--I couldn't find a single byline anywhere. That doesn't exactly stoke my confidence.
They need to establish a rapport with readers, and this is not the way to do it. We've been trained not to blindly trust the things we read and claims of 'peer review' are not enough.
First off, the writing has to improve. Articles need to be rejected if they're not written well enough. I know you don't want to discourage people when you're still so small but a poorly written article is worse then no article at all.
And the names of the author and the reviewers should be listed, and linked to their bio and previous examples of their work.
If you demand high-quality people will strive to meet it to have their work accepted, but if you accept mediocre work there's no incentive for these authors to work harder.
Something about letting any idiot [blog] write the [blog] news just doesn't [blog] sound like a reliable [blog] newsource to me.
Wikipedia is a neat idea, cause I think people will avoid editing a topic they don't feel they actually are an expert on, but the news is an entirely different matter. Look to blogging for examples
While I would never say that the other countries don't exist, I'm sorry, but in the grand scheme, a lot of little poor countries are MUCH less important than "The US and Europe."
The requested URL /pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-October/035328.html/ was not found on this server.
Apache/1.3.29 Server at mail.wikimedia.org Port 80
Just when you thought regular news was POV....
My only comment on this subject is this: Sounds like Jayson Blair's dream come true...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yeah, I don't think this is going to work out, either, since this article on The School of the Americas is already turning into a shitstorm and not moving out of review.
I particularly love the guy who is on and on about it being biased and that the school probably didn't do anything wrong and then is talking about not knowing what Argentina's dirty war was. I suspect, along with the parent, that this isn't going to work out too well. Editorial to the lowest common denominator doesn't work out all that well. (preparing for the inveitable spate of posts saying that slashdot proves me wrong...)
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
NEWS FLASH! It has been determined that President Bush is the dumbest man on the planet! DEVELOPING...
BREAKING NEWS!! George W. Bush is God's gift to all mankind, women especially! CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS!
[o]_O
Hrm...sounds kinda like Slashdot...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
You mean, unaccountable like NYT reporters, FOX reporters, USA Today reporters, and all those other reporters? Unaccountable like the managers at the NYT, FOX, USA Today, Disney, and all those other companies?
With previous media, we already know that they are corrupt and that the entire profession has a code of "ethics" (I'm using the term loosely here) that encourages distortion and secrecy.
Thanks, but I'll take my chances with the new media.
In the future, everyone will be a news reporter.
OK, this is SO 1997, but per ol' Scott Adams:
"Bottom line: We are a species that needs no incentive to give away information. The Internet technology will make it easy to share what we know with the world. And boy will we share.
The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century
now, if only prediction #54 would come true...
What's the "undistorted" view? Your view? What FOX presents you? What the NYT presents you? When the NYT creates the impression that there is a single "neutral" view of an issue, or (when they are making a feeble attempt to be balanced) present only two moderate, opposing views, that in itself represents a serious distortion of the issue. In fact, every major news organization distorts the news in that way. That's in addition to the way in which major news organizations distort the news in order to "protect" us (like not releasing raw statistical data or not releasing data that they fear might be "misinterpreted").
Thanks, but I prefer to see what different "trolling factions" think about an issue. Wikipedia perhaps could perhaps do something to improve the ability of people to keep track of the different views, but the fact that those different "trolling factions" can all edit is a good thing.
I think there is an even greater opportunity for individuals to interject their personal opinions into things that many people believe as the truth.
Don't believe for a moment that the NYT or FOX are "unbiased" or "credible": they all have their biases. In fact, just failing to present what they consider "biased views" constitutes a bias in itself.
Wikinews can probably be improved technologically, but in the end, it should present to you the full spectrum of views and interpretations of an event. And that is far less biased than anything any of the commercial news outlets give you.
I'm sick of reading news that's been sanitized and slanted by big corporate media. WikiNews will revoltionize how news works. Independent, on-the-scene local volunteers will provide an unbiased source of information on what's really happening during a major breaking story.
Best of all, the wiki can be updated directly, in real time - by other witnesses, or volunteer editors seeking to distill all of the data into a coherent news item, or activists with an agenda to push, or government spin doctors, or drunken university students amusing themselves by anouncing that heavy fighting between US marines and Iraqi insurgents has broken out in the parking lot of Chuck E. Cheese.
There are some uses for which wikis are well suited. Providing accurate or authoritative information is not one of them. Wiki true believers: this is a fact of life, get over it.
Indiymedia was brought up frequently in the Wikimedia mailing lists prior to the lanuch of this project. There are a number of safeguards they are trying to do to prevent some of the abuses from indymedia, and in short Wikinews will have a different "ecological" niche than Indymedia. The two projects can exist side by side as they do serve slightly different audiences, just like /. is not the only geek news website around.
Much of this is an outgrowth of people wanting to provide something a little more substantive than quick blurbs on the front page of Wikipedia that link to articles of interest related to current events. What will be very interesting is the multi-lingual aspects of Wikinews, with groups in German and French publishing stories that can be linked to the English side as well and vice versa.
The current major bone of contention is trying to decide under what license the content should be distributed. Most of the people involved like the GPL or FDPL, but these licenses don't work too well if you would like to publish something newsworth and allow other news organizations to do significant quotes from a Wikinews article. This issue is so contentious that it almost delayed the launch of the website, although for now all of the content is being released without license into the Public Domain until the license issues can be resolved. Basically, the concensus is to provide a license that would allow a small-town newspaper to even use Wikinews articles outright in their newspaper (be an alternative to Associated Press) but still be forced to acknowledge that they got the article from Wikinews and provide copyright protection for the authors of the piece so the words can't be arbitrarily changed. Indymedia absolutly doesn't do this at all, nor is it a goal.
Yes, it's good to see the options wikimedia is providing. But I'm not sure they're doing it all in the best way. AFAIK, wikimedia doesn't support RSS, and wikinews is virtually useless for me, without it. Also, there is a lot of overlap here with wikipedia's own topic coverage. Wikimedia sites don't interact well enough with each other as it is: wikipedia is filled with words, of course, but it rarely links to wiktionary. Wikinews will make this worse, rather than better, and fragment the wikipedia user base.
In short, I think they need to work on the technology more, rather than just creating lots of sites based on an admittedly good wiki engine.
Of course you can expect crap at first.
now that would be an intresting wiki site
every time one puses refresh you'll be abel to read the article again in new words
I share some of the concerns that others expressed here, but I believe there is nich for this new projects that most people overlook. Wikinews would be a perfect platform for covering ongoing complex and controversial events, such as the Ukrain election crisis. Such events usually involve so many factors, people, minor events, points of view, etc., that a major publication simply can't afford to cover it adequately in news, or even editorial format. Their tool for this is in-depth coverage where an entire issue or a significant part of it covers the event, with many articles, opposing views, etc.
But Wikinews format is better suited for this kind of coverage. You can integrate all facts in one article, you can dinamically branch some issues into substories when they gain enough importance, etc.
Wikinews is probably not very well suited for conventional stories like a bus fell into the river in Egypt or something, because there isn't much reediting that is needed. But complex topics can be covered really well (if the project takes off).
Another advantage, as some people noted, is that obscure news stories from remote corners of the world can be covered too.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Your question has been done to death alrady!
Now stop trolling.
I like the Wikipedia project, but at least there I understand where the contributions come from: people who (think that they) understand a particular topic. I'm not quite sure how that is supposed to work with news with the exception of copying (rewriting) what you get from regular news sources. Do Wikinews editors read news.google.com regularly and write summaries? I haven't found anything on that in the German tutorial. We'll just have to wait and see.
Old Koreans and Soviet Russia.
I was wondering if maybe there would be a modeification of the MediaWiki software to accomidate news related features.
order/file stuff by Date?
Grouping major events by category?
should false news reports believed to be true at the time (ex 13 people die in plain crash.) be left up and a new story put up (death toll rises to 17)... or should the origional article be edited or removed?
--meh--
The problem here is that the process is much too slow to be useful as a news collection and publishing tool.
I work for a major news agency and we get in trouble if a breaking story is held up for more than an hour. This system is still reviewing news stories days after they have happend.
such as this one (click any for the "story"):
T =PERSONALITIES = 456969 - sending-back-bush-dodgers.html
http://www.cattletoday.com/forum/about8716.html
http://www.kgoam810.com/viewentry.asp?ID=320060&P
http://www.islam.com/reply.asp?id=456969&ct=15&mn
http://kerryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/canada-busy
If there are many such stories on wikinews they might get sued by theonion, but seriously, I can imagine a few low-key satiric or urban-legend type stories sneaking by and hanging around for a while.
Oh, if you're going to Canada, you'll need to know this:
http://www.welkshow.com/floren.html
Tag lost or not installed.
in the wikipedia you have a heiarchy of "editors" the moderate sections, i imagine they will have something similar in wikinews.
tasty electronic music vittles
Go to Fox News's web site and show me one news article (not an editorial or opinion piece) that is biased. Explain why it is biased.
those blinders you have on really protect your brain from the truth... did you follow the presidential election, at all? maybe you heard something about "swift boat vets"? but i guess that didnt permiate your slanted little world view that perhaps constantly airing blantant lies from an extremeist attack group is a touch biased.As a US citizen, I find the fact that Europe no longer listens to its more intelligent part of the population the most worrying thing. The problem is not lack of people with a clue but dominance of clueless people.
(Have you ever tried conversing with an average European about world affairs? Their limited knowledge is ludicrously biased.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
aparently you didnt follow. the swift boat vets barely bought any airtime, but the media storm about them drove the story to rediculous levels, with fox shamlessly repeating their discredited claims til they were blue in the face. that is not journalism, that is biased propaganda.
tasty electronic music vittles
Incorrect. Most IMCs explicitly state "all content free for non-commercial use." Other IMCs allow contributors to choose the license from a menu of the Creative Commons licenses.
Ceci n'est pas un post
I think you miss the point I was making earlier. WikiNews wants to allow commercial distribution of its content. Like CBS News, CNN, or the New York Times. They just want credit if it is used in a commercial publication and for there to be some way to link back to WikiNews as a reference.
This "all content free for non-commercial use" is quite explicit, and states that if you use it in a commercial enterprise, then you are violating copyright. Quite clear to me, and quite clear where the difference between Indymedia and Wikinews is at.
One of the "target" audiences for WikiNews is for the small market publication (like a weekly newspaper for a town of 5,000 people in rural Montana or Utah). These publications are pretty much a public service anyway, and this provides an avenue for them to obtain breaking news reports for their publications that otherwise they couldn't afford. While non-profit in the sense these newspapers are a hobby, sometimes even according to the IRS, they still are commercial entities and would not be able to publish Indymedia news reports because it would be "commercial use". Creative Commons licenses are pretty good in this respect, but there are some problems even there, which was one of the points of the GFDL.
I did miss your point -- I thought you were saying that Indymedia didn't have a clear policy on usage of news stories. I do understand your point about wanting wikinews to be available under less restrictive terms though, and it makes sense as one difference. PS - it's certainly not the case that you need a special license to allow someone to quote or cite your work. Even under Indymedia's non-commercial use only license terms, a local paper could use the Indymedia article as a source for their own article...that falls under fair use. I hope the wikinews license debate didn't miss that point for some reason.
Ceci n'est pas un post
While quoting a small portion is fair use (and the extent of that has been questioned in many court cases... like where one musician copied 5 notes from another song and got sued for copyright infringement... and lost) you can't take substantial portions, even if you rework a little bit of the article with a more local angle, with out formal copyright clearance. This is often done at local newspapers with news service articles, even in electronic media (Radio & Television). And when a news agency subscribes to a news service provider, it usually includes the license agreements.
Look, I think Indymedia is terriffic, and the licensing terms for Indymedia are rather well spelled out including what their intention is for republication. If you want to hand out something from Indymedia at a political rally or on a flyer on a college campus, that is clearly something that Indymedia would encourage. Both of these uses would be illegal with a normal newspaper article unless you got formal premission from the newspaper itself. And I can see some very valid reasons for many of the contributors to Indymedia to keep the non-commercial restriction.