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

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.