[WikiEN-l] an interesting article

[WJhonson at aol.com]

Yes I agree that news stories are snippets, and they unveil over long  
periods of time sometimes.  This is the standard model of news coverage in  
newspapers and television news.  The exception might be an in-depth article  in a 
magazine or like the Biography channel or something like that.  But  then that's 
not "News" because it isn't "New" which is one requisite I'd think  to being 
news.
 
Contrariwise, some Wikipedians work vigorously to suppress part of what  we'd 
call news, and label that censorship "BLP issue" or "potential libel" or  
"not encyclopedic."
 
And so yes, there really should be something that is a middle ground.   An 
everything article, with a policy that BLP will not stand in the way of  
reporting, and also centralized articles.
 
Maybe knol will become this.  They still need to work on it.  I  wrote a few 
knols last week and they still don't appear in Google searches,  although they 
appear if you're already on the knol site.  Knol also tackles  the issue of 
credit more nicely than Wikipedia does.  For professional  writers one big 
drawback to Wikipedia is the no-credit issue.  Most  professional writers would 
like to be credited, at least in part, esp. if they  were the single or main 
writer on the article.  Knol handles this nicely,  and I suppose their intent is 
that those articles deemed most useful will  percolate to the top by being 
voted up.
 
We'll see.
 
Will Johnson
http://www.countyhistorian.com



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