[Wikipedia-l] Wikinews?

[Erik Moeller]

Arvind-

> One of the areas where wikipedia is better than other encyclopedias
> is in our coverage of current events.

Indeed. However, Wikipedia's current events are not a news service, they  
are a summary service, similar to news.google.com, but with human-written,  
free content summaries. These summaries are useful and should remain  
within Wikipedia.

I envision a Wikinews project as something that incorporates elements of  
independent media organizations like Indymedia. That means that Wikinews  
reporters would actually have go out, do interviews, make photos etc.  
Wikinews could become a source for Wikipedia's current events, but it  
would not (only) be a summary service, but a real news service.

I believe the totally open wiki model is unsuitable for such a project.  
There should be an editing phase, and after the editing phase is over,  
material is approved and published, at which point only typos can be  
corrected, and factual updates need to be clearly labeled as such.

In this model there should also be a limit on who is allowed to do  
original research. We cannot allow any anonymous user to claim "I was in  
Jenin today and I saw the Israeli troops massacre 100 Palestinians". There  
need to be two levels of editing; one that is strictly limited to writing  
and correcting summaries (this could include anonymous users), and one  
which is allowed to do original research.

People who want to do original research would have to do so under their  
real name (possibly verified by phone), and their privilege to do so could  
be permanently revoked.

Such a project needs to be well planned before it is launched, because   
structural reforms are hard to implement once a project is up and running.  
I would love to work on something like this full-time, but one has to pay  
the bills somehow ..

Regards,

Erik