Wikipedia Creators Move Into News

[donsu]

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65819,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1


After doing much in recent years to revolutionize the way an encyclopedia can be built and maintained, the team behind Wikipedia is attempting to apply its collaborative information-gathering model to journalism.

Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded.

The current rendition of Wikinews is an experimental version that, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, offers just a taste of what's to come when the news effort builds momentum. Although Wikipedia already posts entries tied to current events, Wales said the Wikinews effort employs a different writing style and approach.

"Wikipedia has always been very strong for background articles on things that are in the news," Wales said. "But on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article."

In an online vote that concluded Nov. 12, members of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, decided by a wide margin to support launching the news site, described on the project discussion board as an effort "to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view."
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[LynzM]

1. Cool! DU should contribute!

I know there are tons of people who are up-to-date in a very in-depth way on specific issues. I'm really interested to see what comes of this! Revolutionize the media!