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]]