On Wikinews

I have to admit, I haven’t really been tracking on Wikinews since it went live. I visited recently, and I remain ambivalent. In many ways, by surviving as long as it has, it may have made it through the shakiest part of its gestation. But it still doesn’t stand well on its own.

The Wired News quote gets at the heart of what I see as its major problem. It’s not trying to do what blogs often do, and act as a colored news filter. But it also isn’t a news organization, as it stands. It’s a bit like a (relatively) clear news filter — the human version of Google News. Many of the stories are derived directly from the mainstream media. It is certainly not plagiarized — all of the news is clearly sourced — but it does have the feeling of a clipping service.

That’s not to say that there are no indications of the radical possibilities. There are stories that are not part of the mainstream, and there is some original reporting, but there needs to be much, much more of this. I understand that at this stage they need to rely on existing news stories in order to “bootstrap” a useful resource, but it needs to get to that tipping point where they use other news sources to fill in where original reporting hasn’t quite made it.

Indeed, ideally, Wikinews would serve as a kind of wire service itself, supplying news to other news services; a kind of grassroots Interpress news service. So, I think some of the ethic that brought Wikinews into being still holds promise, and the site is “not dead yet!” which really is important.

Three notes:

First, notice how many people turned to Wikipedia for news about the new pope. There is some space there between the depth of Wikipedia and the place of Wikinews. I’m not sure what that space is, but clearly people saw value in Wikipedia at that moment, perhaps more than they saw value in Wikinews. Where is the articulation between these two.

Second, right now multimedia (and esp. photos) is pulled only from the commons — I wonder whether is there is a way to articulate with Flickr to provide possible edited images of events. Someone needs to provide a *very* clean way of using cameraphone images in a newsy way, and Wikinews has the potential to fulfill this.

Finally, where are the j-schools in this? Are they worried that by participating in a collaborative project they will somehow hurt their own reputation? I would suggest this is a mistake. If I were teaching journalism courses (I’m not), I would absolutely have students uploading their articles. Even a small journalism class, with weekly assignments, would be a windfall for the site.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

4 Comments

  1. Posted 4/23/2005 at 11:44 pm | Permalink

    I like your comments, but the only one I can act on is the last. I’m trying to approach schools, to engage them, but my target is actually the secondary schools. Do you have suggestions how Wikinews might go about making the necessary connections?

  2. Posted 4/24/2005 at 1:33 pm | Permalink

    Interesting question. I suspect that if you get out to the big education related blogs (e.g., Kairosnews) and some others, it may filter through. Might be worth trying to interest some of the editors of work that ends up in the the hands of secondary school teachers. Might also try a end run through some of the Schools of Education, though this may be a longer-term strategy.

  3. Posted 4/25/2005 at 3:20 pm | Permalink

    My response is simple – Wikinews works. We’re getting more editors and many more readers every day (the growth in the readership of the RSS feed is astounding).

    So while no doubt there are valid criticisms of Wikinews, the bottom line is simple – we’re the site making Citizen Journalism happen.

    But I personally believe that the large professional news organisations will never be replaced. Journalism takes time and money and volunteers will never replace that. But we can make a noise, keep them on their toes, make them aware that not everyone wants spin, bias, inaccuracies etc.

  4. Posted 1/15/2006 at 12:14 pm | Permalink

    I too think Wikinews is not working. Especially in germany it is not getting critical mass in absolutely no public attention (different to Wikipedia). I think the rules are to strict. As long as authors may not enhance articles as they like. Nobody will do the work to post only news every minute like Wikinews wants the users to do. Wikinews is killing the wii principle. Wikinews does not know why Wikipedia was sucessfull

One Trackback

  1. […] Alex Halavais: On Wikinews […]

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>