Sheldon Rampton wrote:
I think we should go further still and shoot for the ultimate goal of creating "Wikimedia." That's media with an "m." It would use Wiki-style rules to enable public participation in the creation and editing of all kinds of media: encyclopedias and other reference works, current news, books, fiction, music, video etc. Like current broadcast media, it would have differentiated "channels" and "programs," each with self-selecting audiences. Unlike current media, however, the audience would also be actively involved in creating its own programming, instead of merely passively watching it.
Way to go Sheldon! I've been raking my brain for months trying to figure out a good name for the non-profit / umbrella organization. "Wikipedia Foundation" was a placeholder but the "WikiPedia" part didn't seem to work for me since we now have Wiktionary, will (hopefully soon) be launching the yet-to-be-named source text wiki, and we will almost certainly expand into the textbook arena in the next few years (with fiction to follow behind that). So Wikimedia is perfect (so perfect that I just registered wikimedia.org and will transfer that to the Foundation when it is set-up)!
However, at this point in time, we simply do not have the resources to do real news reporting (which isn't simply rewriting news reports by others but involves expensive primary research, travel and interviewing). But until/if we do, our process of updating Wikipedia in near real-time as history unfolds will do just fine.
As a matter of fact this is one of the /big/ reasons for our success; many people are very interested in current events so they write encyclopedia articles that reflect this. It is also no cooincidence that whenever there is a hugely important current event that Wikipedia gets a surge of traffic and new contributors. This is a point that we are often complemented on and IMO is the real edge we have over dead tree encyclopedias. So there is no reason to divert these efforts to another project for a long time (if ever). Doing so could hurt Wikipedia in profound way.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma The usual at [[March 11]]