Move Over Wikipedia, Here Comes WikiNews
Seems the folks over at WikiMedia are getting more and more clever as time goes on. First there was Wikipedia, now there's WikiNews.
Unlike Wikipedia, Wikinews will present original material rather than just compiling and summarizing information found elsewhere, according to the news site's organizers. For future submissions, organizers also want to set up a system for accrediting Wikinews reporters who have actively participated in the project.
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"The incentive for behavior in a wiki is to write in such a way that your writing can survive," he said. "The only way it can survive is if your writing is acceptable to an extremely wide audience."
I'm troubled by WikiNews on two levels. First and foremost, there's an outright competition, if you will, between WikiNews and the Blogosphere at large. The notion of WikiNews, as mentioned, is to provide original material as opposed to compiling "news". Clearly, there are two Blog Entry Archetypes implicated here, the Opinion/Commentary Entry and the Thought Leadership Entry.
Already, there are millions of bloggers generating this form of original material and they are tied into an active community and distribution network. Naturally, the proverbial power law still prevents many of those voices from being heard. The implication here is that WikiNews becomes a clearinghouse for original material, the CNN of Bloggers. The primary question is at what cost it comes. See the next point.
The second issue is the community filtering of this material. I'm firmly convinced that Blogging took off as as a social phenomenon because it provided the masses with an outlet for expressing their thoughts and emotions without a filter. Fundamentally, I agree with the spirit of Wiki as it provides a unified community for reaching collective decisions. Of course, the interpretation of the events from around us is not one of the arenas that seem to benefit greatly from filtering - think Big Media. Surely many will contest that the community will act in the best interest of information; however, the community is no greater than its inherent biases.
After all, some might argue that Big Media also presents information "in such a way that your writing can survive".