Wikipedia Creators Move Into News

Joanna Glasner Email 11.29.04

After doing much in recent years to revolutionize the way an encyclopedia can be built and maintained, the team behind Wikipedia is attempting to apply its collaborative information-gathering model to journalism.

Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded.

The current rendition of Wikinews is an experimental version that, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, offers just a taste of what's to come when the news effort builds momentum. Although Wikipedia already posts entries tied to current events, Wales said the Wikinews effort employs a different writing style and approach.

"Wikipedia has always been very strong for background articles on things that are in the news," Wales said. "But on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article."

In an online vote that concluded Nov. 12, members of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, decided by a wide margin to support launching the news site, described on the project discussion board as an effort "to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view."

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.

Both Wikinews and Wikipedia run on Wiki software, an application that allows users to collectively author web documents. Each page on the site contains an "edit" link, which users can click to edit passages created by other writers.

Wales believes the process of collaborative editing has allowed Wikipedia -- which contains more than 1 million entries in more than 75 languages -- to maintain a neutral tone on a wide variety of controversial topics. He expects the same process to prevent bias in Wikinews coverage.

"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."

Alex Halavais, graduate director for the informatics school at the University at Buffalo, said in an e-mail interview that Wikinews has much in common with two other efforts at citizen journalism, Indymedia.org and South Korea's OhmyNews.

However, Halavais believes Wikinews' emphasis on neutrality places it a step apart from the Independent Media Center, which typically has a left-wing viewpoint, and OhmyNews, which allows authors to editorialize.

"Compared to these two models, Wikinews feels much more like an effort at traditional journalism, though the journalists may be amateurs," Halavais said.

Halavais believes Wikinews' collaborative editing process will help foster a neutral tone in the content of its stories. However, he thinks writers' biases will affect the selection of articles contributed, in much the same way that profit motives impact what mainstream media outlets cover.

"One of the things mainstream media does, for better or for worse, is report on news they expect will drive sales," he said. "This means ignoring foreign news, for example, in many cases, because a local audience is not as interested. Since there is not the same economic incentive, the question is what the agenda of Wikinews will look like. I suspect it will reflect the interests and lives of its citizen reporters."

As it matures, Wikinews won't resemble a mainstream news site and won't compete directly with established media outlets, Halavais said.

For now, Wikinews organizers aren't worried so much about competing with big media as with filling the news page with enough content to keep readers coming back. The site's "latest news" section has been running three or four stories a day lately, although Wales is confident that number will grow in time.

"People shouldn't be disappointed when they come and see it's a very limited selection of stories," he said. "It's going to take some time to build up."

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