On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Also, when new information comes out which supercedes the old information, the old story doesn't get updated to reflect this new information.
Isn't that the typical model though for most news stories published (at least here in the US)? Newspapers, TV news, etc. aren't going to go back and modify the story after so many hours or days, they'll publish a new one if they think it has merit.
Yes, which is exactly why I said that the "Wikipedia model of news story development is a refreshing change to the status quo" and that "Wikipedia offers something that is [...] unavailable anywhere else on the Internet."
When a big story happens and there are 80,000 stories about it on Google News with varying levels of redundancy and timeliness, it's nice to check out the Wikipedia article which invariably gets started, at least as a starting point. I don't think Wikipedia does a particularly great job at it, but then again, neither do the traditional news outlets. In particular, I remember during the early days after the Menezes shooting the Wikipedia article was repeating the same untruths as the news media, *without attribution*. But I really like the concept of writing an encyclopedic article about a recent news story. And I think if the very people who are arguing against these articles would instead work toward making sure they remain encyclopedic, they'd be especially useful. Yes, there are examples of newsworthy events being covered in Wikipedia which are written poorly. But I don't see how that's an excuse not to write about any of them at all.