Dan,

you're absolutely right - the stories were a good example that Wikinews doesn't break under stress, and indeed, that it can provide reliable, well-sourced information even when faced with hundreds of anonymous edits (not to mention nefarious section editing bugs ;-). And I want to again publicly say thanks especially to you for being on the story right from the start. Everyone involved stayed cool and handled the situation very well.

I'll try to do some proper media analysis of this in my next State of the Wiki. One thing I do encourage everyone to do is to take a look at how the other citizen journalism sites are doing. Indymedia, at time of this writing, has no edited story about the attacks on its English or German homepages. OhmyNews International has a very brief summary and an opinion piece:

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=236274&rel_n... http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?menu=A11100&no=...

The Korean version did a bit better, but of course I can't judge the quality of the content. The blogosphere did what it usually does in situations like this: hyperlink frantically and add uninformed opinions ;-). It is very much possible that the most significant grass-roots "competition" in providing reliable information came from Wikipedia itself. But Wikipedia could not, unlike Wikinews, include original reporting directly from people in London, and its format is very different.

That being said, I do think everyone in the Foundation, up to the Board, is trying to raise the exposure of Wikipedia's sister projects. Indeed, Wikinews has benefitted immensely from its relationship to Wikipedia -- through cross-linking, press coverage, mentions in presentations and so on. Jimmy, Angela and Anthere all mention Wikinews when they talk about Wikimedia to journalists or to audiences. I therefore want to thank both the organization and the community for making the experiment that Wikinews is possible, and for supporting it as best as they can. You rock! :-)

I hope that the events of 7/7 will remind us that we are here to build something together which we all believe in, and that our small disagreements are insignificant compared to the ideas we all stand for, most importantly the open exchange of views and knowledge, and the belief that everyone should be allowed to freely shape and voice their own opinion. The Wikimedia community is, in my opinion, the vanguard of a new enlightenment, which stands in sharp contrast to whatever it was that motivated the killers of London.

Thanks, Dan, for showing us what matters most -- doing good work. Now, I'd really like to see an article about the political effects of these attacks. Have they had any impact on the decisions that were meant to be made at the summit? Have they harmed the process of debt relief and aid for Africa? I'll look to Wikinews and Wikipedia for answers in the coming days.

Best,

Erik

On 7/9/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote: We tried watching BBC News 24 for a bit, but it just annoyed us. Too much repetition to fill space even by 11:30am. The BBC websites were fantastic though.

Speaking from australia, i know nothing of the bbc's funding, but one gets the feeling from what i saw of that broadcast that it has been cut back quite a bit.

Dan Grey wrote:

[snip]

We were the first on the web with the news, anywhere: http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Coordinated_terrorist_attack_hits_L...

Within a few hours, a team of people were working to create the most up-to-date and most authorative news article anywhere on the Internet. Co-ordinating ourselves largely through the IRC channel (which anyone can access with just their browser using a simple link), we had people from both around the world and right in London searching for photographs, getting permission to use them, taking notes from spokesmen and press conferences, and constantly updating and fact-checking our articles.

Twenty-four hours later, our main article -

http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Coordinated_terrorist_attack_hits_L...

has had some 60,000 hits from Europe (excluding France) alone.

Looking at the webalizer stats, which are for the entire globe, there are about 60,000 hits in total, which would make the Europe figure quite a lot smaller.

(Thanks to Kate for the stats.) As most of our traffic comes from North America, it's reasonable to assume that we had well in excess of 100,000 reads that day. Small in comparison to any major news service, but it proves we're on the map.

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