Maybe we should create another sister-project to the wikipedia about current events. I was just thinking about it and there are major problems with usenet news groups and kuro5hin.org, so they are not reliable as a news source. The monopoly-owned mass-media that we depend on are often biased and incomplete, but a wikipedia one would present each point of view as an OPINION, not a FACT. We wouldn't leave out facts like they normally do to create a stronger bias. Wikiwiki would work very well for independant media. What do you think?
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On Sat, 2003-03-15 at 16:55, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
Maybe we should create another sister-project to the wikipedia about current events. I was just thinking about it and there are major problems with usenet news groups and kuro5hin.org, so they are not reliable as a news source. The monopoly-owned mass-media that we depend on are often biased and incomplete, but a wikipedia one would present each point of view as an OPINION, not a FACT. We wouldn't leave out facts like they normally do to create a stronger bias. Wikiwiki would work very well for independant media. What do you think?
Dan, have you seen http://www.indymedia.org/ ?
It's not wiki-like, but it is open-to-all-to-publish. A couple of points of comparison:
* Indymedia has a very strong left-wing bias compared to what mainstream American viewers are used to. It's quite refreshing after an evening of FOX news ;) but there's a certain point of view that is presented. I don't think that an article with a pro-Bush, pro-bomb-Iraq, or pro-McDonald's stance would be well received there (though as far as I can tell, they would publish it if one were to submit such a thing).
* Unlike wiki, published articles cannot be edited, only commented on. (Of course, editable articles invariably lead to the occasional cry of "censorship!" as some bit of drivel is removed by another editor. Indymedia does at times hide articles, but keeps them available to those who look for them rather than deleting them outright.)
In these respects, one might consider it even less reliable than usenet or k5, where at least you're more likely to see a range of different strong biases. ;) The theory of wiki (at least, a la wikipedia) is that many hands will knead an article into shape, correcting each others' inaccuracies and balancing multiple biases with a neutral overview. Can this model work for current events? I don't know; the model expects that articles will be built over time by many different people, while a news site has very different requirements, for high-quality work in the short term.
Good articles on high profile events can be constructed quickly -- witness Wikipedia's [[Space Shuttle Columbia disaster]] -- but as far as I know, it was built entirely from secondary sources, distillations of news reports from more conventional media and NASA's press briefings. While that's great for an encyclopedia, I don't know how pointful it would be for a news site to report only what others have already reported.
But, who knows?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)