Arvind Narayanan wrote:
One of the areas where wikipedia is better than other
encyclopedias
is in our coverage of current events. However, the current scenario
has a couple of disadvantages:
* The amount of information about a particular event that can
meaningfully be incorporated into the article on the person/thing etc.
is quite limited
* The info. is often dispersed among more than one article
* Readers have to scan the whole article to get to the one line or
paragraph about the current event
The depth with which a current event can be covered is very limited.
Daily newspapers have deadlines that need to be met, and often don't
have the leisure to consider the subject in any serious depth. The
advantage that we have in current events is that we can link to
background material by doing nothing more than adding a pair of square
brackets, TV is in a worse position, and those personel are sometimes
just as compulsively caught up in events. The 9/11 events were
understandably all-consuming for the TV networks on that day. Here on
the West coast there is a 3-hour time difference from New York, so the
hits took place before I got out of bed that day. Almost nothing else
was in the news that day, and I soon found that TV coverage was highly
repetitious. How many times can you watch the same plane hit the same
building before the event ceases to inform?
A weekly publication is able to give a more comprehensive picture, and
eliminate the repetitious. A quarterly is in a better position to
evaluate the event and begin placing it in an historical context.
So why not have wikinews? A collaborative news wiki.
It would be somewhat like indymedia, but with important differences:
* Wiki
* NPOV
* News about an event would be integrated into a single comprehensive
article rather than having a collection of articles written at
different points of time
So how about it? (Don't know if this has been proposed before...)
I think that something of the sort is periodically suggested by various
people. NPOV in current events may only be the ability to refrain from
editorializing. I don't know if a single comprehensive article about
the event is always attainable. That is normally the domain of the
quarterlies, but we are in a position to present "quarterly" information
more quickly than the quarterlies, and that's a big advantage.
The other point. for having a credible current events service is
maintenance. Putting ourselves forward as offering that kind of service
requires disciplined and regular attention to such things. (Even though
I don't like what has happened to the general layout of the Main Page, I
can still take notice of the fact that those who are involved have made
considerable efforts to keep the material fresh.)
My suggestion to Arvind, since he does contribute from India, would be
to start [[Current Events in India]]. He is in a position to provide
current information about what is being reported in the Indian news
media to people whose understanding is limited to the belief that India
is about to drop a nuclear bomb on Pakistan.
Ec