Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Founder Introduces Wiki Magazine Sites
KingJawa writes "Wikipedia blew away Encyclopedia Brittanica, but can the model be used to upset the magazine industry? Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, thinks so. His company, Wikia, today announced three open-source magazine-style sites where users can write about news, opinion and gossip — one magazine wiki each for politics, entertainment, and local interests. Each open-source magazine hands total editorial control to the readers, allowing them to read, write, edit, and dictate the editorial feel for each topic."
MORE INTERNET TUBES!!
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Not so very much different from Digg and Slashdot?
I hope they introduce a geek/computer/technology-magazine too.
It's called MySpace, blogspot.com, wordpress, etc.
User-generated content is good, but it's no mass-media killer - especially when other folks have already gone down this road already.
Interesting idea. The main difference between newspapers/magazines and encyclopedias is of course the timing of information. I can write an encyclopedia article about a subject I know by investing time and research. However, the research for writing magazine articles is much different, relying on interviews, travelling, even subpoenas, etc.
Wikepedia already has certain magazine aspects to it, it is updated with current events quite quickly. But those articles are (usually) simply relaying information obtained from a traditional news source.
I would like to see the attemp though, what's the harm?
Isn't that why I read Slashdot?
Not exactly a new idea, is it?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
So now instead of arguing back and forth with others in one (of many available) forums out there, you can just go in and change the commentary of your antagonist.
This seems to me just to be another collaborative site launch into an already saturated market. The only novelty is that you can go and mess with someone else's opinion or contribution.
When Wikipedia came out, I don't remember any other models like that before. . . user contributed encyclopedia articles. The fact that items got updated nearly in real time made it so much more attractive than hard books or even the online versions of the traditional books.
But there are already online versions of magazines. The advantage here of course is this will be user contributed like Wikipedia. But I don't think it'll have the same momentum because I see online magazine articles updated daily already.
the GNAA? That would be some good rear reading material.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Clicking through the politics wikimag I was surprised to see (announced as breaking news, no less) the story Anna Nicole Smith 1967-2007 DEAD. And that's politics?
(Now if someone edited the story to make it that GWB had authorised the raising of ANS from the dead, that would be politics).
it'll be interesting to see if the Entertainment Community wiki is embraced or attacked by the MPAA/RIAA. it seems like it would be a great free publicity and endorsement of shows/movies/songs. however, i'm sure once screenshots and clips start to go up the gloves will come off.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and theorize that this project is going to have ads integrated from the beginning. If Jimbo wants a revenue stream, maybe he should just say so instead of selling it as some sort of fresh new revolutionary idea... user generated content? Never seen that before on the web.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Wikipedia didn't blow away Encyclopedia Brittanica. Encarta did. As Bill Gates once pointed out to Brittanica, the Brittanica sales force of door to door sales reps added negative value to the product once it could be put on CD-ROM. Brittanica's problem was a high cost per sale.
If the readers have total control such as in Wikipedia it will have the same problems that Wikipedia did. Almost all of those complaints revolved around politically charged topics/persons. The politically charged environment in the US will just make it ugly. Of course this is IMHO. Julian
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
Are this magazines competition to wikinews?
The collaborative news project is a supplement to Wikipedia, but suffers from lack of authors and articles. Wikipedians prefer to write encyclopaedia artcles about news stories, which leads to problems: unverified pieces of information appear in Wikipedia articles and are not corrected afterwards.
I'm sorry, I don't want to upset too many wiki-ites, but it really didn't blow away Britannica. It had the same number of errors per article with shorter articles. Of course, this is a very crude metric - the significance of these errors is also important, but probably un-quantifiable.
Wikipedia is still troll ridden and error prone, and I think even the greatest fans will admit this. You only need think of the Stephen Colbert/Elephant thing to see how abused it can be. There is more information on Stargate Atlantis than Goethe. Whilst some people may consider wikipedia a useful tool, making statements like this just fuel its detractors.
Given that Hollywood stars have sued tabloids in the past for printing false and/or damaging articles these Wiki Magazines really seem like a bad idea. What is to stop someone from posting something complete false, degrading or career damaging in the entertainment.wiki? Who will be responsible when the affected party seeks monetary compensation for the perceived damage?
Britannica was in trouble by 1996. That's when it laid off it's entire door-to-door sales force. By 1998 the staff had halved in size. Now, WHEN did Wikipedia become a force?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The real question is, what happens when they enter the market for , ahem, Gentlemen's Magazines? Since they are all read for the articles anyway...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Original:
A recent study further supports the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 1:
A recent study further contradicts the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 2:
A recent study further supports (sod off creationists) the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 3:
A recent study further contradicts (f*ck U & UR ape mother, evolutionist!!) the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
Edit 4:
A recent study further -CHEAP VIAGRA, call 0800 LURV ACTION now!!!!- the theory of Darwinian Evolution [...]
People can have very strong feelings when it comes to opinions and allowing them to edit opinion pieces is just asking for a flamefest.
Wiki magazines?
First edit: And the man of the year award goes to: Bill Clinton
Second edit: And the woman of the year award goes to: Hillary Clinton
Third Edit: And the woman of the year award goes to: Boy George
Fourth Edit: And the woman of the year award goes to: George Dubya
Fifth Edit: And the person of the year award goes to: George Dubya
Sixth Edit: And the person of the year award goes to: Bill Clinton
Moderator Message: Stop playing with it, we're locking it down for 48 hours.
Time Edit: (pushes clock ahead two days)
Seventh Edit: And the person of the millenium award goes to: Bill Clinton
Moderator Message: Stop playing with it, we're locking it down for 9999999 hours.
Eight Edit: Moderator Message: Stop playing with it, we're locking it down for 0 hours.
Ninth Edit: And the person of the millenium award goes to: Me
Have you read my journal today?
I thought it was Brittanica that blew the Wikki away. It's hard for amateurs to beat experts in the field..
Wikipedia - a good place to start your researches - but a rotten place to finish them!
And now brittannica is on the web. So that "blew away" CD-ROM.
In one way or another, we'll have a majority. A screaming-weemie heebie-jeebie "thou shalt hear me above all others", or another yo. I'm part o' consensus, hear me out if I"m the majority solution.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Repulsive pink and cyan design for the entertainment one and the top headline is "Paris Hilton buys Candy Panties". Obviously they're targeting the retards that gawp at content-less glossy magazines stuffed with candid shots of celebrities out shopping. Apparently there just aren't enough of these vapid magizines or web sites out there already. More like vacuous.wikia.com than entertainment.
Give us nude-girlfriends.wikia.com already.
...wikipedia to only allow hearsay, it only seems fitting that if there were to be a magizine based on teh same that it would be one of politics, entertainment or and in summary... gossip.
The difference here is that the policies of wikipedia are such that responsibility is taken off wikipedia, unlike other publications and encyclopedias.
Having no responsibility that could see a court room should say a lot about the trustworthyness of it.
...when the phone suddenly rings. Dammit! And I was getting a good buzz on too. I pick up the phone. It's Jimmy Whales. He tells me there's some kind of problem with the servers because he's having a dickens of a time getting to the main Wikipedia page for the English portion. I try to ssh into the cluster master but can't reach it. So then I connect to the Conserver box and try to hit the console port on the cluster master. Jack shit is what I get, so I stash my pipe in the drawer, lock my Gnome desktop and head down to the server room to see what the hell is going on.
I get down the hall and I smell something that smells suspiciously like smoke. Just at that moment, security guard #1 flies down the hall past me yelling something about a terrorist attack. Screw him. Everyone knows that the only terrorists that have attacked U.S. soil are either dead, sitting in the Whitehouse or working as private contractors in Iraq and Iran. I keep going. Suddenly I'm having a lot of trouble breathing because of all this stringy gray stuff billowing all over the place.
I finally get to the server room only to find that I can't open the doors with my ID card because the swipe fixture is, well... gone. Fucking hell. Someone's going to have to fix that and it's probably going to take months. I decide to check the door handles just to see if the doors might still open anyway. WTF? The door handles aren't there either. The doors are there, but they look a little weird. Kind of folded over and dented all to hell with the windows missing. Just what in the hell is going down here? Well I gotta get to that server...
So I climb through the hole in the door. Man it's freakin' hot in here. Make a mental note to call the HVAC engineer and have the temp turned down to sub-tropical. Man it's REALLY hot in here. I can't see a damn thing either. But it's not like anyone's turned the lights out. There's this odd orangy red glow and all this stringy grey stuff all over the place that is making it VERY hard to get any work done. Where in the hell is the console server??? I guess I'm going to have to feel my way around. Man it's REALLY REALLY hot in here. OK. I can't take this shit, I'm going to go down to the HVAC engineer and ream him a new one.
I jump out of the hole in the door and make my way back to the hall...
I dunno if this will succeed or not. Not that it matters.
To go from creating Wikipedia (Like, the coolest, most successfull, important and complete repository of geek/human knowledge ever), to a project sporting "Paris Hilton buys Candy Panties" on the front page.. It's a step or ten down on the ladder of saintlyness. If Jimbo had his priorities straight, he would be out saving the planet with Wikimedia projects, not providing lewd and shallow entertainment.
But hey, considering his background at Bomis, provider of lewd and shallow entertainment, maybe he just came full circle. =)
So I was very interested in seeing what the WikiLocal site was like and checked it out. The main portal page is there, but try clicking the links on the page. It's pretty much a 404 farm right now. The site should have been tested before it was announced for general use. How many people now will just walk away from it instead of contributing right away? And how long before they get around to checking it out again? This site could have had a strong pop from day 1 if it were actually ready to start handling visitors and contributors.
Funniest opening sentance evah!
Wikis are good for exactly one thing: encyclopedias. The less the wiki is like an encyclopedia, he less useful it is.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
And despite the Wiki crowd's insistence to the opposite, Wiki's aren't user friendly.
They have a complex rule-set for editing, discussion and notation.
Wikia fails the first test of mass marketing technological solutions: Keep it simple.
Blogs may be less sophisticated on the back-end, but here's a newsflash: people who
read gossip blogs could give a crap.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
In the Politics magazine they have a listing for Democrat and Republican sections that appear to be pretty active. The Libertarian section is empty. On the main page most of the topics seem to be arguments between Democrats and Republicans. There is an article on Bill Redpath but there are no comments. It didn't take long for this place to just turn into another partisan battle ground between Dems and Reps.
I can't wait to read the threads at this place as the elections get nearer. They should have some really insightful information by then.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
Wikipedia.org is a pretty well made site. It works fine in multiple browsers and is simple enough that most people understand it the first time they use it. I went and tried out the local news "wiki magazine" (called local.wikia.com) and was very disappointed. It was not at all intuitive or easy to find/contribute by comparison. It is sorted into sub categories, but the ability to add or edit articles was a distinct, different part of the UI. You click on an option in the "Share" section to add an article, instead of just going to the right section once you've specified a locality. Worse yet, using Safari, it automatically forwards you past the page where you specify the tile for the article using some javascript and it hangs the Safari browser when you actually submit a title.
Between the usability nightmare and the lack of cross-platform testing, it is clear these people are either not serious or are incompetent. I'll stick with one of the many pre-existing local news wikis, thanks. The name "Jimmy Wales" was the only reason I looked at this site. Congratulations, Mr. Wales, you've just tarnished your reputation by associating it with this garbage.
I'll be looking out for when Wiki-Playboy starts up along with its "open-source" models (wink, wink).
There format looks like an open model of Digg.
okinawa japan
I no longer write anything on Wikipedia. I've been in the process of crafting an article, saved it, and then seen it come up for deletion because the category editors didn't like it. Now mind you, this was a stub, so anything that I put there that's accurate is better than what was there - which was nothing. It usually takes me quite a while to write an article, especially when I'm citing original sources and marshaling all of my facts, dates, etc. The third time that this happened to me, I started poking around. There's a very political structure to the Wiki editing that is, IMHO, very *un*-cool.
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
How will it be different from usenet?
Wikipedia "blew away" "Encyclopedia Brittanica"? Not only
do you not know what you're talking about, you don't know
how to spell it. What an utterly asinine statement.
Wikipedia blew away Encyclopedia Britannica[ citation needed ]
Fixed.
Rob
The prob he's going to have is that the agendum of the media is not that of academia. Slashdot comes close because its 'for nerds'. Digg is just a freefall directory of crap. Not a magazine. It points to articles, but doesn't have/create any. Its agenda are closer to those of the media however.
It'll be interesting, but it won't be a magazine.
Because you can - or because you should?
They really should consider allowing an FPO AP category for Americans abroad to post their news. I could see this being somewhat revolutionary if used right.
okinawa japan
May be the biggest problem. We all remember what happened with Orkut, right?
For all we know, Wikia may very well degenerate into an open-for-all political blogmess. I'm also betting moderator clampdowns won't go over so well in a forum where the heightened prevalence of original content will make such gestures smack of censorship.
Another difference that I think will just as quickly lead to the failure of a collaborative magazine is the problem of "too many editors." Compelling writing suffers from the myriad of tiny wording changes reflected wiki publishing. Wikipedia's "Featured Articles" (their highest category) usually have correct information, lots of citations, and good article layout, but they rarely have what I would arrogantly describe as really good writing.
I mean who else would let you write content for nothing, while he selflessly collects the revenue from the Adsense? I'm sure plenty of sucke...willing writers would love to selflessly give their time to creating free content for Jimbo.
It's the Wikipedia model and its going to change the world!
PS.
He had only one criticism, he said, to make of Mr. Pilkington's excellent and neighbourly speech. Mr. Pilkington had referred throughout to "Animal Farm." He could not of course know-for he, Napoleon, was only now for the first time announcing it-that the name "Animal Farm" had been abolished. Henceforward the farm was to be known as "The Manor Farm"-which, he believed, was its correct and original name.
"Gentlemen," concluded Napoleon, "I will give you the same toast as before, but in a different form. Fill your glasses to the brim. Gentlemen, here is my toast: To the prosperity of The Manor Farm! "
There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover's old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.
But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The top stories were 911 conspiracies, Al Gore is an idiot, and cross-posted blog posts.
Entertainment was just as dull, with most of the stoeies being "Why I hate <insert TV show name>".
About the only interesting thing I could find to do there was to deliberately vote for the more useless stories (go the Creationism Museum!) just to make the place look even more crap than it is now.
Oh, and it's got a huge minimum page width of about 1000 pixels or so, which is a major pain for me as I run my browser in a portrait window.
I really like Wikipedia and think that it's format is really ideal for an encyclopedia: it allows people from a large range of viewpoints to contribute by synthesizing information from a number of different sources. I've been thinking about setting up a wiki for the college paper I work on, but I'm not entirely sure it would be worthwhile. The Wiki format works for Wikinews (even if Wikinews hasn't been as successful as Wikipedia) because it is based on the same synthesis approach as Wikipedia. I don't think the wiki construct is well-suited for blog type content because any sort of edit, constructive or not, is changing the substance of a particular individual's opinion, and there's a certain sense that that opinion belongs to its author and should not be tampered with. Maybe someone can convince me otherwise--I mean, sure you can edit these "magazine" sites but why would you?
Many people consider Wikipedia to be failing in its goals of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work - see the essay Wikipedia is failing for more details. Why would these new wiki based magazines be any different?
...someone post the code here in iambic pentameter and preserve it forever
"brittanica" is probably something very popular in France (of which Brittany is a region) but you're talking about Britannica from Great Britain here...
-- Let's go Viridian.