The W-bomb
You can’t tell from my blogging, but I’ve gotten rather sensitive about the word “Wikipedia.”
Earlier this year, after I’d written my research proposal, I was casting about for a title to communicate the core concept I hoped to pursue. I recalled a whitepaper by Shayne Bowman, Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis called “Amazon-ing the News,” which I thought snappily conveyed what they were about. Just before sending it off to the folks at Reynolds, I slapped on the title “Wikipedia-ing the News,” with a little note-to-self to think of something better.
So now, every time my project gets introduced, the word “Wikipedia” is thrust into an expectant void, and opinions are formed before I say the first word about my research. Thus, as I mentioned, I’m a teensy bit sensitive. But it’s probably time to confront the W-bomb head-on.
When I mention Wikipedia, my listener’s full attention turns automatically to the “wiki” part. It’s editable by anyone. All of the tricky issues inherent in the public, anonymous provenance of the site’s information come rushing to mind before we even get to the “pedia” suffix. But that suffix is where my fascinations — and my research questions — begin.
Let’s get the wikinoia out of the way. The news site I’m theorizing will be completely agnostic as to who creates the content. You could make a version of this news site where all content comes from (1) a newsroom of professional reporters and editors, (2) a nebulous and voluntary set of “citizens from the community,” (3) a hybrid of professional journalists and community contributors (more on that much later), or (4) Maureen Dowd. I don’t care. (OK, except for 4, which would be a travesty. I do not in any way authorize the use of my ideas to further MoDo’s influence on the world.)
As I mentioned in my last post, “encyclopedia” is too small and ancient a word to describe Wikipedia. The site has no predecessor for how it organizes archival and contextual information while accommodating breaking news, how it shepherds dozens of competing voices towards consensus, how it manages to make information more valuable over time rather than less, how it incorporates communities, how it became the most search-engine-optimized site on the Web …
The site has no predecessor, period. There’s a ton for news sites to learn from it. And there are many questions to address for how to translate what we learn to a journalism context. It’s not the only inspiration or example I’ll draw on for this project, but it’s a big one.
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Re: “shepherding dozens of competing voices towards consensus”; I thought of this in particular while reading Farhad Manjoo’s “Chuck Knol: Why Google’s Online Encyclopedia Will Never Be As Good As Wikipedia.”
By default, Knol articles can be edited by readers, but each edit must be accepted by the original author before the revision takes hold. Along with the obvious problem of giving authors control of when they’re edited, Knol doesn’t give readers any guidelines for how to edit. One Knol article on Tori Amos describes her 2007 album American Doll Posse as marking a return to “daring and somewhat angry” songs and adds that her voice on the record sounded better than it has “since 2001.” Those lines are vague and mushy: What about the album is angry? Why does her voice sound so much better than before? Under Wikipedia’s NPOV rules, both descriptions would have to go, and any reader could delete them with a couple of keystrokes. But Knol allows such personal opinions, so you’d have to persuade the writer to excise them on other grounds—which, of course, takes a lot of work. Instead of going through the trouble, I clicked away.
As I perused Knol over the past couple of weeks, I tried to contact the authors of the few articles that I found interesting. This proved difficult; Knol doesn’t require writers to post their contact information. Even though readers are asked to accept these people as experts on a topic, there’s no easy way to ask them questions about their expertise. Still, I did manage to contact a few Knol posters, and I was surprised by what I found: Most people who contributed to Knol did so for money.
It’s a paradox, but it’s clear that Wikipedia’s advantage over Knol is its community — the back-and-forth, the shared sense of standards and debates about and policing of those standards. In short, despite anonymity, Wikipedia’s editors are simply more responsible than Google’s authors.
It is also a reminder that Google handles search astonishingly well, software design amazingly well, monetization crazily well, authorship fairly well, and active communities… well, actually, not terribly well at all.
Tim
22 Sep 08 at 7:17 pm