Wikinews

October 25, 2004 11:47 PM

Wikinews: "Wikinews is a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view." It looks like MoJo lives, kind of, but we weren't the ones who ended up building it. Bummer. [via]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken (4 comments total)

Wiki news - the guardian's take on the whole wiki phenomenon.
posted by triv at 12:14 AM on October 26, 2004

As impossible, if not more so, than Wikipedia. But why not try? The goals are noble, the hurdles high. The trickiest piece will be avoiding libel lawsuits. The rules in some countries are draconian. In some ways the risks are higher the more successful this gets.
posted by ozjohn at 2:50 AM on October 26, 2004

I think OhmyNews offers a good model for structuring this, although I don't think Wikinews would be able to pay citizen reporters. Dan Gillmor has some background info on OhmyNews.
posted by revgeorge at 6:08 AM on October 26, 2004

But why not try?

Indeed. Most projects worth trying look kind of impossible until you start to make them actually happen.

It will stand or fall, flop or fly, on the strength of its transparency and of the participatory community. I think the major risk is the dilution of the latter: There will only be so many people willing and eager to contribute conscientious effort to something like this, and as the number of such projects increases, you spread them thinner and thinner until quality finally really does start to suffer in the ways predicted by naysayers.

Part of the problem is that there's not really a structure for reward, other than karmically. I remember a Sterling story from back in the '90s where he described a system that had people contributing to "the nets" at small points and in small ways, and being called on periodically to do small favors for other users/members. But we haven't seen the evolution, yet, of a means for controlling that kind of culture. Stuff like BitTorrent and Wikimedia go some distance in the direction needed, but as long as they're scattered and use uncommon modalities, there's the old problem of attention again.
posted by lodurr at 7:53 AM on October 26, 2004