Richard Grevers wrote:
Can I just take a minute to congratulate Wikipedians on the articles on the Columbia accident ( http://www.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster ). The coverage is better than anything I found on other internet media or print media, and dispels many of the "jump to conclusions" storylines. Wikijournalism beats standard journalism :-)
It's funny, but everytime I talk to journalists, I assure them (because I usually get a hostile-seeming question about it) that the open content wiki model is good for an encyclopedia, but can't replace journalistic writing of news stories.
But sometimes I wonder. I, too, turned first to wikipedia (and added a photo of one astronaut as 'payment' for the information got) for solid, clear, unbiased, thorough background information... updated in near-realtime, too.
--Jimbo