On 9/21/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
wrote:
Peter Jacobi wrote:
"Andrew Lih"
<andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:
FYI, German Wikipedia is more in line with the
idea that "not every
news event deserves an article." They are much more selective and are
not shy in telling you so. :)
Yeah. I've recently managed to get an "Wikipedia is not a News Portal"
into the German equivalent of [[WP:WWIN]]. But this POV seems to collide
with the consensus at enwiki.
I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering
everything. I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent
news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover. The
solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older
events more. I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time
periods! Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered
events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child
kidnappings? What about the thousands of political scandals, major and
minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced
cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.? It's all good info we're missing!
-Mark
My personal opinion is that Wikinews is for stuff that is too recent to
have
reliable and verifiable sourcing. Wikipedia is for when the smoke has
cleared and there is verifiable information. I think about how many times
something has been reported by every single news outlet and then later
retracted by every single news outlet because of misinformation. I'm
thinking specifically of the mining accident a few months ago where the
newspapers ran the story about finding nearly all the miners alive, when
that morning, as people were reading their papers, the TV news stations were
reporting the exact opposite.
At Wikimania 2006, I described this phenomenon - Wikipedia uniquely
fills the gap between "the news" and the history books. It's an
instantaneous cumulative view of the state of the world, given the
best information at that point in time. Rather than shedding this
function, we should be embracing and celebrating it.
Back in 1995, when I was teaching journalism, I pondered when a
"rolling memory" system might be realized given the development of the
Internet. That's why I was captivated by Wikipedia back in 2003.
Wikipedia has accomplished this, whether by design or fluke. And it's
been revolutionary.
I'm curious if there is a reasonable reason against Wikipedia serving
this function, other than "encyclopedias are not news", which I would
argue is old-style thinking (and something I've heard from more than
one so-called "academic" committee.)
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)