Trying to Wiki the news

Joanna Glasner at Wired writes about some problems at Wikinews:

Operators of Wikinews are finding their mission rife with frustrations and challenges.

The site, an offshoot of Wikipedia, the volunteer-maintained online encyclopedia, is facing pressures its parent organization rarely had to contend with, such as ferreting out fake posts, incorporating original sources and updating coverage to reflect rapidly changing current events.

"In Wikipedia, the writing style of an encyclopedia is more timeless. You can get it right eventually. It's going to be the same article for many years," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder. "With a news story, the actual story has a limited lifespan. If it's not neutral, you've got to fix it quickly."

The Wikinews site follows essentially the same set of rules as the Wikipedia encyclopedia, which allows anyone to create entries or edit and correct other people's work.

Slashdot, another community news site with millions of users, has similar problems with timeliness and quality of their news.

See also my earlier post, "Slash(dot) and Burn".