Delirium wrote:
I certainly hope it can be done in a reasonable way, but I'm wondering if there's been any thought as to how to differentiate this from Indymedia? From what I can tell, Indymedia does use bylined reporters for many of its articles, but they still end up generally being, well, not very neutral. Hopefully Wikinews would end up rather more credible than Indymedia, but how to ensure that?
I think these are reasonable questions, and I also think that there are reasonable answers to them.
The core answer is: wiki. By removing an ethos of "individual ownership" over particular articles, and replacing it with an ethos of "consensus", the sharpest edges of bias get worn down very quickly.
But somehow it seems like it'll naturally attract more of the other sort of people---activists who are reporting with a particular agenda in mind. That tends to lead to the facts being arranged to fit the pre-held agenda, rather than the other way around...
This is entirely possible, but of course, the same can be said of wikipedia, and it is in fact a problem for us (though not terribly much so, most of the time). We have cases where activists camp out on articles and make it quite difficult for alternative perspectives to balance the presentation -- but even so, we still manage to be better in these cases than virtually all other sources.
We live in an era when citizens have to decide which part of the media is more dishonest: organizations like Fox News, which have dropped all pretense of neutrality, or organizations like the New York Times or CBS News, which have dropped the neutrality but kept the pretense.
It would be hard to be much worse than what routinely passes for journalism these days. And I think if we try, we can be a lot better.
--Jimbo