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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
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
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You do realize that from within the United States you may load such websites as news.bbc.co.uk, don't you? I think Wikinews will be interesting, but it's hardly the first online source of non-US news.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am still waiting for Wikip0rn!
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
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
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!
So, exactly what's the difference between this and Indymedia?
The interface?
More publicity?
I volunteer at a radio show, and Writing news is a lot of work, it's hard to find people to do it for free and professionally. Generally the result is poor quality, or just stuff copy-pasted from BBC or other sources.
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.
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!
No, not at all. GE, Disney, Viacom, Newscorp, and Time Warner own television networks that employ actual editors that can be held accountable for their actions when they screw up. Wikinews is a bunch of anonymous people editing each other's articles, and as such it has no credibility.
For more information, click here.
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.