On 9/21/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/20/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Peter Jacobi wrote:
"Andrew Lih" andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
FYI, German Wikipedia is more in line with the idea that "not every news event deserves an article." They are much more selective and are not shy in telling you so. :)
Yeah. I've recently managed to get an "Wikipedia is not a News Portal" into the German equivalent of [[WP:WWIN]]. But this POV seems to collide with the consensus at enwiki.
I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering everything. I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover. The solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older events more. I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time periods! Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child kidnappings? What about the thousands of political scandals, major and minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.? It's all good info we're missing!
-Mark
My personal opinion is that Wikinews is for stuff that is too recent to
have reliable and verifiable sourcing. Wikipedia is for when the smoke has cleared and there is verifiable information. I think about how many times something has been reported by every single news outlet and then later retracted by every single news outlet because of misinformation. I'm thinking specifically of the mining accident a few months ago where the newspapers ran the story about finding nearly all the miners alive, when that morning, as people were reading their papers, the TV news stations were reporting the exact opposite.
At Wikimania 2006, I described this phenomenon - Wikipedia uniquely fills the gap between "the news" and the history books. It's an instantaneous cumulative view of the state of the world, given the best information at that point in time. Rather than shedding this function, we should be embracing and celebrating it.
Back in 1995, when I was teaching journalism, I pondered when a "rolling memory" system might be realized given the development of the Internet. That's why I was captivated by Wikipedia back in 2003. Wikipedia has accomplished this, whether by design or fluke. And it's been revolutionary.
I'm curious if there is a reasonable reason against Wikipedia serving this function, other than "encyclopedias are not news", which I would argue is old-style thinking (and something I've heard from more than one so-called "academic" committee.)
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)