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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."
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.
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.
I hope that their strict adherence to "Non Point of View" holds here. Bias in media reporting is a major problem in the spread of news, and Wikipedia users will have the own type of bias (against large companies, restrictive laws).
I see this as being very useful for eyewitness accounts, and much better than Fox News, but I will hestitate to use it over traditional Newspapers. While Newspapers have gotten it (very publicly) wrong more than a few times recently, they do have departments of people fact-checking each other. If Wikinews is successful, the end result of large usage rates will result in the same thing. Until then, expect incomplete and biased newstories...
Just like Fox News.
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.
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
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
There is no such thing as "No Point of View." Everyone has a point of view, and it will show in their writings. Based on the typical person who would write in this, I'd expect it to quickkly form leftist leanings.
As for your moanings about Fox News, NBC, CBS, and ABC all lean left, to different degrees. Fox News leans right, so if you moan about Fox, you need to complain about the other news channels as well.
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
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
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://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 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.
ABC leans Right, and has since Capital Cities bought them. Disney has only increased the rightward tilt. The golden shove directed at Dan Rather indicates Viacom wants CBS to move Rightward. MSNBC also suggests the NBC of the future...again, Rightward slant.
Basically the only US news media that will have a left slant (and only Center-left at that) after all these rejiggerings at the major networks go will be CNN and PBS. And don't be surprised if CNN gets leaned on in the future.
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!
As for your moanings about Fox News, NBC, CBS, and ABC all lean left, to different degrees. Fox News leans right, so if you moan about Fox, you need to complain about the other news channels as well.
OK.
All the other news channels have leanings in various directions. It's extremely hard to get the real story behind many widely reported news stories. A lot of journalists are total idiots who entirely miss the entire point of most stories. A lot of editors have no idea what great news reporting is.
My point is that all these things will be very evident is Wikinews. At least until they get a large enough base to overcome these problems.
However, part of modern journalism is the credibility of the reporter.
I think people overrate the "credibility" of professional reporters: many of them seem to follow a "code of conduct" and operate in an environment that pretty much guarantees bias and inaccurate reporting; they just dress it up nicely.
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.
These days, it is completely unnecessary and highly irresponsible to judge the credibility of news stories based on who wrote them; you can evaluate the facts behind almost all news stories yourself, using official data, on-line eyewitness reports, digital media, etc.
Cute waste of bandwidth and if I were deaf using the internet or had my sound muted it would be completely useless.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
As for your moanings about Fox News, NBC, CBS, and ABC all lean left
Actually a news source can attempt to allow different opinions framed in a non-confrontational way, not in opposition but by choosing a measured position on each topic, and occassionally allowing quotes from one side or the other to show how they diverge. Le monde and BBC news do this well for example. Far better than any newspaper or news channel in the UK or the USA that I've seen.
This doesn't mean 'Fair and Balanced' à la Fox which leads the viewer to think that both views (however extreme) chosen by the programme to frame the issue may have merit. To put ideas in a gladatorial fight to the death like that doesn't help understanding, it just encourages the viewer to pick a side (ie : I'm from the left. I'm from the right). Jon Stewart's interevention on that 'Crossfire' program in the US recently was interesting in that regard.
It's an old fashioned idea, but people and the media should STOP thinking in terms of left and right, and attempt to evaluate ideas for social security or whatever else on the basis of merit, not on the basis of whether it's advanced by 'the most liberal senator... blah blah' or 'that crazy Bush'. That might require more thought than most are willing to devote to their politics though. Most of the myths in politics about the other side are downright wrong - eg Democrats in the US 'Tax and Spend' and Republicans are fiscally responsible, Privitisation is always bad (from the UK) etc etc.
PS
As I'm sure you're aware, what you call 'left' in the USA is generally what the rest of the world would call center. The way you talk about 'leftist leanings' makes it sound like the word communism in the 50s.