QUOTE(Joel Leyden @ Sat 8th July 2006, 3:54pm)
Excellent article!
Perhaps, but here's that phrase again:
QUOTE(Frank Ahrens, Washington Post @ 7/8/2006)
I'm a fan of Wikipedia and Wiki notions, such as "citizen journalism." I just want them to be better.
Citizen journalism. Except that these are not "citizens" - the people submitting material to WikiNews could be from anywhere, paid by anyone, with any number of hidden and possibly malicious agendas. Admittedly that's a very negative way of looking at things, but when you're "reporting the news," you have to be able to control who provides the input, simple as that.
There seems to be some question as to whether WikiNews really is trying to portray itself as something it's not. The problem is that you can't simply dismiss it as being on the level of a cheap supermarket tabloid, because it really does have the potential to produce bits of information that would be difficult, or even impossible, to obtain anywhere else. And yet you can't really treat it as "journalism" either, at least not in the strict sense. It's more like chaos theory as it applies to the dissemination of information - much like Wikipedia itself, only happening at a faster rate. It's useful as long as you have no illusions about the nature of what you're seeing.