Comments on: Why Wikipedia beats Wikinews as a collaborative journalism project

By: Ana

Ana — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:24:00 +0000

It would work better if it maintained time and location relevance of the articles.

By: Quora

Quora — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:38:06 +0000

Why is Wikinews so under-used?…

I came across this article http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collaborative-journalism-project/ which summarises the difficulties of Wikinews compared to Wikipedia. Mainly: * Wikipedia style is more formulaic and establi…

By: Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking » Nieman Journalism Lab

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:02:29 +0000

[...] the scope of its sister site — largely because its premise of discrete news narratives isn’t ideal for the wiki platform — a news-focused wiki that could succeed, Lih thought, was one that focused on the core unit [...]

By: 5 media trends to watch | Mediapunk

5 media trends to watch | Mediapunk — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:44:41 +0000

[...] Why Wikipedia beats Wikinews as a collaborative journalism project [...]

By: Links #1 | Wikipedia, Critical Point of View

Links #1 | Wikipedia, Critical Point of View — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:07:36 +0000

[...] Why Wikipedia beats Wikinews as a collaborative journalism project [...]

By: John Ivey

John Ivey — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 03:17:13 +0000

Brian,
I knew that Wikinews keeps all old articles around, perhaps I phrased that poorly. Wikinews articles lose relevance quickly. While even the most obscure wikipedia articles get a few hits a day (assuming they’re not orphaned) and the occasional edit, wikinews articles go into the archive. They lack the dynamism of wikipedia and its therefore hard for me to get excited about contributing.
What you cite as the problems of constant revision are what excite me about joining in. Wikinews is a valuable project and I use it, but if the discussion is about barriers to growth I think that’s one for many people attracted to the wiki format.

By: Donald Lancon

Donald Lancon — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:57:21 +0000

Wikinews does not delete articles, but they protect them very quickly after they’re created, so thereafter only admins can edit them.

As a user who would mainly edit established Wikinews articles to correct grammar mistakes and other awkward wording, link to Wikipedia articles for more context, add categories, and so forth, I find that I cannot edit the vast majority of articles at Wikinews because they’re protected.

When I asked about this, established users there said all I had to do was write a few original news articles and I could become an admin and gain the ability to edit protected articles. Problem is, I don’t *want* to create and “publish” new articles; I just want to edit pre-existing ones. But I can’t.

If I could edit Wikinews the way I wanted to, I might get more involved in the project (and might even write some news stories eventually!), but the barrier to participation (the way I want to do it, anyway) is so high, I just gave up on it.

By: Brian McNeil

Brian McNeil — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:46:52 +0000

John Ivey,

Are you under some sort of illusion that Wikinews deletes old articles?

It doesn’t.

Nor does it change them, delete once-considered-important facts, or any of the other *problems* with constant revision.

Have you tried to access the New York Times’ archives recently? Or, those of any other long-running commercial news site? Did your credit card enjoy the experience?

By: John Ivey

John Ivey — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:00:56 +0000

My first thought was along the same lines as the first commenter. I contribute to Wikipedia partly because it’s nice to know that its there forever, i can watch edits, a lasting contribution to human knowledge.

I was also surprised that he didnt put more emphasis on the fact that when a news even happens, all that is required to update the Wikipedia is to add “X died/announced/was arrested/was elected/etc on Feb 8, 2010″ into the preexisting article and boom! Wikipedia is ahead of Wikinews. And anyone looking for information would be better of with Wikipedia’s pre-existing background coverage+the new news story. That’s the 2nd big advantage. The article is already there; adding is easier than creating.

By: Steven Walling

Steven Walling — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:49:39 +0000

Wikinews may be lagging behind in volume of coverage, but it’s slowly becoming important to Wikimedia in another way.

Since it’s so much smaller and easier to get consensus for changes, Wikinews is currently using the new beta skin for MediaWiki, which is only a user preference in Wikipedia (meaning you have to log in to see it). They also just enabled Liquid Threads, a pretty radical improvement to the standard discussion pages in Wikimedia projects.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:42:16 +0000

English Wikipedia gets all the attention. But it’s incorrect to say or imply that Wikinews is somehow a failure because it isn’t yet a top-10 site on its own. It has its strengths and it’s still learning how to do this. It took English Wikipedia five or so years to learn how to do it, it will take other projects a similar sort of time.

By: Brian McNeil

Brian McNeil — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:54:57 +0000

In some respects, Wikinews was created to address a perennial problem of people overloading Wikipedia articles with latest news snippets. Without a critical mass of contributors Wikinews does indeed struggle; mass-collaboration on a news report is well-nigh impossible, realistically you need to push out a fully-completed article on your own. The articles on Wikinews with substantial numbers of contributors are driven towards an encyclopedic style.

However, what may be a sub-footnote in a someone’s life could be a major news story for several weeks – just where are you going to find the gory details on that in 50+ years? Certainly not in the latest version of the Wikipedia article.

Andrew points out that myself, and other Wikinews contributors are indeed ambitious; far better to aim high and not quite get there, than to make a halfhearted effort and be dismissed for not trying.

There is a dramatic difference that both interviewer and interviewee overlook – Wikinews allows original research.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Original_reporting

Somewhere in there is an interview with Shimon Perez, another with the head of the US Nazi Party, sundry 3rd-party political candidates around the world, and a handful of honest-to-goodness investigative pieces that are simply not covered better anywhere else.

By: Nihiltres

Nihiltres — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:08:54 +0000

I thought this post was very interesting, and it inspired me to write a post on my blog (linked here as my website) about a difference that I think is being missed here. I think that there’s an important difference to be considered on the Web between *aggregative* and *collaborative* content production, and I think that that is one of the key differences between Wikipedia and Wikinews here. As Lih’s comments highlight, the formulaic and condensed style of Wikipedia leads to a more aggregative model. I’d like to suggest that while aggregative models tend to lead to greater surface participation, a deeper collaborative model is nevertheless desirable for quality. Using both aggregative and collaborative approaches (for the strangths of each) is probably the best way to attack the problem.

By: Jonathan Stray

Jonathan Stray — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:16:51 +0000

Fascinating. Perhaps news organizations have something essential to learn here. The notion of putting out news in discrete and unchanging chunks is very “paper” thinking. If you assume that most people don’t follow every story closely, then what most people need is a complete history, not just the diffs.

Now here’s a question: would it be useful to highlight the sentences that have changed since the reader last visited that topic? Rather than asking readers to construct the whole story from the updates, we would be asking them to construct the updates from the whole story.

By: David Morton

David Morton — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:12:45 +0000

Part of the disparity might also be that the Wikipedia community gravitates toward creating something of lasting value. From an outsider’s perspective, Wikinews feels fleeting in the same way that any other newspaper article or blog post is old news by the time it’s first read.

Even though Wikipedia articles are frequently updated and changed, at a rapid pace even, you still get the sense that a contribution is more than a one-off event. It’s a contribution to something much bigger.

Just from perusing the discussion pages on a given Wikipedia article, you can tell that contributors take the notion of permanence very seriously.