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Is a "Wikipedia For News" Feasible?
Larry Sanger writes: Online news has become ridiculously confusing. Interesting bits are scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, and other noise. Besides, there's so much interesting news, but we just don't have time for it all. Automated tools help a little, but give us only an unreliable selection; we still feel like we're missing out. Y'know, back in the 1990s, we used to have a similar problem about general knowledge. Locating answers to basic questions through the noise of the Internet was hit-and-miss and took time. So we organized knowledge with Wikipedia ("the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"). Hey, why don't we do something similar for the news? Is it possible to make a Wikipedia for news, pooling the efforts of newshounds everywhere? Could such a community cut through the noise and help get us caught up more quickly and efficiently? As co-founder of Wikipedia, I'm coming down on the "yes" side. I have recently announced an open content, collaborative news project, Infobitt (be gentle, Slashdot! We are still in early stages!), and my argument for the affirmative position is made both briefly and at length.
Since they "are still in early stages", how would you want them to differentiate themselves? I can think of a few things that can set it apart from a site like Wikinews which is based on vanilla Mediawiki:
- Multiple, personal, compound filters (subject, region, country, town, breaking, highest ranked)
- Rich feeds (mail, RSS)
- A personalized front page based on your filters with some "suggested reading" thrown in
- Article ranking based on moderation and reputation (of both source site and submitter)
- Comment section (we need our flamewars)
- A mobile app (yes, you can go with a mobile theme, but some newspapers and news aggregators have apps that actually make finding and reading stuff a lot easier)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
And I believe the oldest still-operating one is Indymedia, which was founded in the late '90s. It's unapologetically aimed at being activist grassroots media, though, not aiming at event-handed mainstream news coverage.
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Hi, I'm the Infobitt founder/CEO. No, it's not the same thing at all. Wikinews doesn't address itself to the problem of making sense of the news in the face of facts being scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, etc. Traditional citizen journalism just gives people a platform to write articles and pretend to be journalists. We're not doing that. We're inviting people to find, rank, summarize both individual facts and stories (which we call bitts, which are made up of facts). Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.