WikiPedia Founder Wales Speaks About Wikinews

sebFlyte writes "One of Wikipedia's founders, Jimmy Wales, has given an interesting interview to news.com.com.com about the new WikiNews project. He talks about his dissatisfaction with IndyMedia's bias, the problems with traditional news media and how to make Wiki content credible (a problem WikiPedia faces, as previously reported)."

Comments

Moderation?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I was around in the early days when Indymedia was being planned. I helped a bit from the technical end, how to set up Apache, which Linux would I recommend, etc. I dropped out of the project because I disagred with their moderation scheme, there is very little accountability.

I'm a flaming liberal, and these days I can't stand Indymedia. Why? Because many comments and stories are hidden by the fascist moderators.

Apparenly I'm not liberal ENOUGH to have my comments read by others, especially when I dare to criticize some Black Blockster when they do stupid shit like setting a trashcan on fire...

Does Wikinews have a similar moderation scheme?

Well...

[euphonaesthesia]

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.

But what about issues and facts that may indeed offend a lot of people? One of the problems with mainstream media is that they must retain an audience and so they often frame the information such that it is in a view that is pleases as much of its audience as possible. A single issue has many viewpoints, and each of those viewpoints may be presented with a bias. Take nuclear energy for example--one can explore the dangers of it or talk about its advantages. Both can be reported in a netural way, but by highlighting one and not the other, there is another form of bias. They may circumvent some types of political and opionated biased in this way, but they do not eliminate the bias as to what does and does not receive attention.

Wikipedia with 'Expert-Certified' Articles

[davide101]

Would it kill a project to have 'expert versions' of pages that have been okayed by a panel (elected by majority vote, of course) of experts? These could be right next to regular pages and inspire a little more confidence in results.... especially in more specialized or scientific areas. Your thoughts?

To a man with a hammer...

[bcrowell]

...everything looks like a nail.

To Jimmy Wales, everything looks like a job for a wiki.

Wikipedia was a smashing success, and that surprised a lot of people, including me. But if we step back and analyze why it was successful, I think there are some very specific things that made it work, and that don't apply so much to other types of work:

1. instant gratification -- You can be the one to create the article on Green Day, or crustaceans, or whatever you happen to be interested in, and there you go, half an hour later, it's something useful that you've given to the world.
2. permanent value -- You can tell yourself that your article on crustaceans will be something that will always be there for other people to read, albeit with modifications over the years.
3. factuality -- The job of an encyclopedia is mostly just to describe the world as it is. You don't need to be creative, you just need to describe the facts.

Well, wikinews fails criterion #2, and probably #3 as well -- its writers probably aren't going to be flying to Fallouja to report first-hand, so all they'll have to contribute is their own opinions about the news. The one place where wikipedia really falls flat on its face is topical and controversial articles, i.e., wikinews' entire prospective subject matter.

Then there's wikibooks, which fails criterion #1. There may be some healthy, thriving books in there, but as for the physics textbook I've been checking on now and then, nobody seems to have the long-term motivation to write anything past the first chapter.