[wordup] Wikinews and the Growing Wikimedia Empire

[Adam Shand]

Wikipedia and it's associated projects continues to amaze me.

Adam.

From: 
http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2004/12/3/213547/371

Wikinews and the Growing Wikimedia Empire

By erik, Section Features
Posted on Fri Dec 3rd, 2004 at 09:35:47 PM GMT

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.