P2pnet.net News Feature:- The adoption of the Net has also meant the growth of ‘citizen journalism’ where people write about - blog - events as they really are, rather than as they’re spun and pre-spun by corporate print and electronic media outlets, many with vested interests.

And that’s what the Net is really all about: p2p to the nth degree, meaning traditional news sources no longer have the last word.

With that in mind, InfoAnarchy’s Erik Möller says the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikinews project is now officially online.

Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Wikinews and the Growing Wikimedia Empire
By Erik Möller - InfoAnarchy

After almost two months of deliberation and voting, the Wikimedia Foundation has now officially launched the Wikinews project in English and German editions. More languages will follow soon. Wikinews aims to be to news media what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias: a free, comprehensive and, eventually, reliable source of information, collaboratively created by volunteers around the planet. Wikinews explicitly allows original reporting, making it somewhat similar to Indymedia, while adhering to a strict Neutral Point of View policy.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an international non-profit organization which operates volunteer-driven projects driven by wiki technology. Wikis are websites which anyone can edit - wiki pages are collaboratively created by many different people over time. Various mechanisms are used to control the changes that are made and to review existing articles. These mechanisms are continuously evolving, and Wikinews in particular puts the challenge of quality control in the spotlight again.

All content created by the Wikimedia Community is made available under open content licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License, ensuring that it will be freely available for copying and modification forever. Aside from Wikinews, Wikimedia operates the following projects.

• Wikipedia, an encyclopedia in over 100 languages. About 20 of these have more than 10,000 articles each. As of December 2004, the English Wikipedia had over 400,000 articles, and the German edition had over 170,000.

  And these aren’t just short puff pieces - more than 30% of all English articles are over 2,000 characters long. See Erik Zachte’s Wikistats page for all the statistics you can handle.

  While it is true that Wikipedia covers geeky subjects in excessive detail (one of the most bizarre examples perhaps being the article on OS-tan),it also has comprehensive articles on subjects like the national parks of England and Wales, the Shroud of Turin, the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993, the Olympic Flame, the Origins of the American Civil War, Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on authority, and bathing machines.

  In less than 4 years of existence, Wikipedia has become one of the 200 most popular websites world-wide, according to statistics by Alexa.com. It has received intense media coverage around the world and managed to survive without any advertising, driven entirely by donations and generous support from the project founder, Jimmy Wales.

• Wikibooks is a younger and less well-known project that strives to create reference sources on specific subjects, some of them of relatively narrow interest, such as the Wikibooks on surviving as a Teaching Assistant in France or Lucid Dreaming. One long-term goal of Wikibooks is to provide open content alternatives to proprietary textbooks, and Wikibooks on paleoanthropology or Physics might one day become just that.

  Some have suggested that Wikibooks should become part of a larger Wikiversity project, a true open-content teaching and learning resource.

• The Wikimedia Commons, launched only in September 2004, is already shaping up to become one of the Foundation’s most popular and successful projects. The Commons is a repository of free media - pictures, sound files, spoken texts - that are potentially useful to at least one Wikimedia project. In less than 3 months, more than 10,000 media files have already been uploaded - whether you’re looking for the amazing early 20th century color photography by Sergei_Mikhailovich_Prokudin-Gorskii, Fayum mummy portraits, stereocards from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, or photos and stamps from the Fareo Islands, you will find them there.

  Pictures and other files are created and collected by Wikimedians. The Wikicommons does not allow "fair use" of copyrighted photography - all content must be under a free license, so you can be relatively sure that you can use whatever you find there, even in a commercial context. The nice thing about the Wikimedia Commons is that any file uploaded there can immediately be used on all Wikimedia projects - just specify the file name using the appropriate wiki syntax (e.g. "[[Image:MyPicture.jpg]]"), and you’re ready to go. In the long term, it may even be possible to offer the same functionality to any wiki site using MediaWiki (see below).

  In my initial proposal for the project, I suggested that it should be merged with another Wikimedia project, Wikisource, which collects free source texts, but this merger has not happened yet.

• Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary. Like most Wikimedia projects, it exists in many languages. The English Wiktionary, for example, provides English definitions of words, but also translations, etymology, and related terms (example entry). While Wiktionary is reasonably succesful, the structure-centric nature of the project has led some to question whether a simple wiki is the right tool for the job.

  I have proposed a new project, Wikidata, which will require substantial software changes, but in theory makes it possible to use a wiki-like process to enter structured data of any type. If Wikidata is implemented, it could become a realistic alternative to countless proprietary databases. While Wikidata is still a pipe dream, similar projects already exist: KendraBase and jot.com are wiki-based solutions for storing and retrieving structured data. I believe Wikidata is a requirement before Wiktionary can become truly useful. I also believe this to be true for Wikispecies, a recently created database of biological taxonomies.

• Wikiquote, a free collection of quotations. It is already quite useful as such, and most entries are neatly separated into attributed and sourced quotations.
• MediaWiki, the open source wiki engine that powers all Wikimedia projects. While it is somewhat controversial whether MediaWiki is a Wikimedia project, many people consider it as such, and it is certainly essential for Wikimedia’s operations. MediaWiki is generally considered one of the most feature-rich wiki engines in existence and used by over 100 wikis, including many of the world’s largest.

Building trust
Perhaps the biggest issue facing Wikimedia today is the lack of credibility of the content created by its world-wide community of volunteers. Wikimedians point to recent quality reviews which have found Wikipedia articles to be frequently superior to those in traditional encyclopedias, but the simple fact that an entry may have been turned into rubbish a minute before you have decided to look at it does not inspire much confidence. For this reason, lots of energy and thought has been spent on finding and implementing review methodologies.

An example of one such methodology is the Featured Article Candidate process on the English Wikipedia. Users can nominate Wikipedia articles for "Featured" status, and if community consensus is reached, they will be added to the respective list. But again, once an article has been added, it is not "frozen", and may very well degrade in quality over time.

The flagging of individual revisions of articles as trustworthy is one of the most frequent suggestions for achieving quality control. This would allow for an distinction between "stable" and "unstable" versions of pages. However, the necessary code for this functionality does not yet exist.

Wikinews
This brings us straight to Wikinews. I wrote the original Wikinews proposal on October 10, 2004. Because the creation of the Wikispecies project without much discussion resulted in an outcry by some members of the community, a new process was used for deciding whether Wikinews should be launched. In fact, no other Wikimedia project has undergone such intense scrutiny before its launch. After some discussion, I set up a vote on whether the project should be launched. A large majority supported the idea, and the Board of Trustees of the Foundation authorized a "demo" site to demonstrate the feasibility of the project. Yesterday, this demo site was transformed into the English edition of Wikinews, and today, the German edition has been launched as well.

A look at the English site will reveal that there has been quite a lot of activity already in the last few weeks. About 100 articles have been written, though some major events were never covered.

One major issue with news is that people have to be able to rely on the accuracy of articles the moment they are published, not two weeks later. Some have argued that this makes news inherently incompatible with the wiki idea of gradual improvement. I disagree, as I see wiki as just a specific tool for one specific purpose: to collaborate with other people on writing documents. Whether such collaboration happens over the course of a week, a month or a year is irrelevant. The Wikipedia article on the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, for example, was kept up to date and in decent shape during the course of events.

However, I do believe that there should be a process in place to systematically verify the accuracy, neutrality, legality and comprehensiveness of articles. For this purpose, I proposed the Wikinews review process, which is currently being tested on the English Wikinews edition. Reviewing an article is optional, and articles are flagged at the bottom or top according to their current status (in development, under review, successfully reviewed, review failed, never reviewed). Review occurs on the discussion page related to an article, and similar to the Featured Article Candidate procedure, consensus has to be found before it can be considered successful.

So far, original reporting has not been an issue yet, as the submitted articles relied on external sources. When original reporting is added, a specific process may be required to verify the trustworthiness of contributors, and to make them accountable for their contributions.

Many ideas on the matter can be found in the Wikinews proposal, which includes a brief FAQ, as well as the Wikinews Thinktank page. Current discussions are held on the Wikinews Water Cooler page.

I have heard many arguments and ideas on why Wikinews will, must fail, but the most bizarre reason that has been brought up against it is that "we don’t need it", because there are already so many different news sources and blogs. This strikes me as very silly, as Wikinews provides some key advantages over those sources:

• It is not limited in scope. Articles on Linux kernel releases can coexist with those on a major political crisis. Like Wikipedia, it can become truly gigantic, an überblog, and the only news resource you ever need.
• It follows a neutrality policy. This is taken quite seriously, and if a viewpoint is attributed properly and on-topic, then there is little reason to remove it from an article. While traditional media focus on moderates, Wikinews can present extreme views without holding them, and as such offer a more useful mix of information.
• It is not subject to the standards of news selection and exposure used by the traditional media. Much has been written about media bias, and I am a believer in the idea that any so-called "liberal" bias is greatly outweighed by the requirement of privatized media to make a profit, to compete, to keep advertisers happy, and to avoid flak from well-funded think tanks. But even if you hate Noam Chomsky and believe that the media are controlled by evil liberals who want to force their homosexual, anti-war agenda on innocent children, you will still have to appreciate that the only bias in Wikinews is that of its contributors, and that the anarchic nature of the project makes it difficult for any particular faction to gain a foothold.
• It is completely free. As registration-only access to quality news sources becomes the norm, this freedom increases in value. Wikinews articles can become the basis for pieces in your local district newspapers; they can be used by people who could never afford the licensing fees associated with a Reuters or Associated Press news feed. Even the mere transformation of existing news into free documents if of immense, global cultural value. And no matter whether you read Wikinews or not, it will put the pressure on traditional news media to compete with its free offerings.

Nevertheless, I also believe that making Wikinews successful will, in some ways, be much harder than creating an encyclopedia. The competition from free sources is stronger, the motivation to create something which others have already created smaller, the amount of "real work" that has to be done is larger, and the software tools currently available to us are in some ways inadequate.

How you can help
The success of Wikinews will in large part depend on people like you. There are plenty of things that need to be done. For starters, quite a few changes to MediaWiki will be necessary to make Wikinews a really smooth operation. The most important of these changes is the ability to automatically display the latest stories in a category, so that the various index pages do not have to be manually updated. This would turn MediaWiki into a full-fledged wiki/blog application that could be used for a variety of other purposes as well. So here’s what you can do:

1. If you’re a PHP/MySQL developer, subscribe and send an introduction to wikitech-l, and we’ll show you how you can get started. MediaWiki is very open in accepting new developers. This kind of help is also crucial for some of the other ideas mentioned above, such as the review process, or the Wikidata concept.
2. If you’re an artist, you could create a Wikinews logo and add it to the respective page on our cross-project coordination wiki (note that you have to be logged in before you can upload files). Artists are also constantly needed in all the Wikimedia projects to illustrate articles.
3. If you’re a writer, then you can start working on Wikinews articles right now - become familiar with wiki usage, if you aren’t already, and create a new page in the Wikinews Workspace.
4. If you’re a photographer or filmmaker, and close to an upcoming event, you can shoot pictures, and upload them to the Current Events page on the Wikimedia Commons.
5. If you’ve got money to spare, you can make a donation, which will ensure that Wikipedia, Wikinews and similar projects can stay alive and thrive. The WMF may also decide to invest money specifically in goal-oriented software development in the future.

To stay in touch, join the relevant mailing lists and IRC channels. I hope that you will participate in building the volunteer media empire called "Wikimedia". What we see here is merely the first wave of revolutionary changes that the Internet can bring to society. The tools we have right now are comparatively primitive to what we may have in the future — real-time, WYSIWYG collaboration tools with built-in voice and video chat, running on mobile devices, allowing anyone to participate in the creation of content anywhere in the world. Maybe Wikinews will not be successful in its current incarnation — if that is the case, then the next generation of the project almost certainly will. And when that time comes, it will be a great day for humanity, and a wonderful expression of our creativity, our goodwill, and our ability to work together in common cause.

_{Erik Möller, December 2004. This article is in the public domain.}

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 5th, 2004 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 24659 times