Why we’re not creating a wiki
My research proposal was called “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I’ve spent many posts chronicling the wonders of Wikipedia. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, the news site I’m creating to illustrate the arguments I’ve been advancing here will not be a wiki.1 Why am I such a hypocrite?
I decided early on that given the time and resource constraints on my fellowship project, I would have to keep the site’s scope tight. As a result, there are tons of components of journalism’s evolution that this project will not significantly touch on — things like business models, social networking, and the world of mobile.
One of the things we heard loud and clear from the folks who led local wiki projects was that wikis are like gardens. They require a sustained investment of time and energy up front to make them truly valuable over the long term. Once the wiki is live, the community has to be nurtured, and goals and expectations must be set before the value of public editing starts to become plain. According to Mike Ivanov, one of creators of DavisWiki, he and the site’s other founding contributors spent months seeding the wiki with hundreds of articles on Davis before opening the site up to the public. I realized early that we probably wouldn’t have enough time to put in the investment to make the wiki worth it.
A lesser consideration in my decision to forgo the wiki was the feature set of available software. Playing around with open-source wiki packages such as MediaWiki and Expression Engine, I found that support for multimedia wasn’t the best out of the box. (The subject we’re covering — growth and development in Columbia, MO — will require a fair amount of multimedia to present effectively.) I also had some worries about how much flexibility the software would give us with the site design.
Finally, one of the things I most hope to demonstrate is that there’s nothing magical about a particular piece of software that enables the principles of journalism I’m arguing for. Focusing on delivering context doesn’t require a wiki, it requires a shift in purpose.
All that said, if this were an open-ended project, I absolutely would have made it a wiki. With enough time, we would have figured out design and multimedia. And if we succeeded in convening a community invested in the site, public contributions could be invaluable. I had a brief love affair with a little software package called Bitweaver, before deciding against using it in production. I’m tremendously intrigued about the possibilities for projects such as Semantic MediaWiki. Wiki software is only going to get more robust and interesting in the years to come. It’s awesome to see news organizations such as the Washington Post and Jacksonville.com experimenting with it. I’m sure one of my departing recommendations to the Missourian when I complete this fellowship will be to investigate transitioning the site to a wiki over the long term.
- In case you’re wondering, I’ve decided to use Wordpress. [↩]
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Good point about wikis and gardens. It just takes time.
I'm very interested to see what is going to be Plan B. I have something I wanted to get on your radar.
Consider Law and Order:
The first quarter is the event and introducing all the players.
The 2nd quarter is about getting a plausible theory to connect events and players.
The third quarter is about transforming the theory into a provable story.
The fourth quarter is where two contradictory stories go head to head and Truth is determined by the jury or the deal.
Truth is so satisfying. It's why people love baseball.
The point I'm trying to make is that to put ongoing events in context, a working theory has to exist first. We don't have the time of the historians. We have to contextualize what happened yesterday and often today. Here's how I think it can be done. In fact a working theory always exists, The 2 common stories for "growth" is "bad rich people are screwing good poor people". or "rich smart people are selfishly worried about quality of life and ignoring poorer people's need for jobs." it's not very hard to fit the events in any place at almost any time into that story. It's an easy story to tell and guaranteed to get agreement, especially from the most active element of your readers.
If it were me, the place I would start , not for publishing but for the journo, is the theory about growth and development in general. The theory comes from some really smart people who have looked at the problem for long time. IMHO, The smartest theory about growth and development is by Jane Jacobs, especially "Cities and the Wealth of Nations".
So, I would get everyone on the team to read the book. Have a couple of discussions to get her theory of the "crime" clear so that everyone on the team agrees (sort of like the detectives in the first quarter of L&W. The whiteboard, the sargent sending them out ot interview X).
Whoever has the job title or the most articulated vision acts as general editor/chief detective. Not to say that everyone has to agree. But everyone has to have an articulated view of how development works, in general. Then editorial meetings can be really neat arguments about does this event support or negate the working theory of the event.
Then use the wiki, not for community involvement, but as a place to collect evidence, discuss the evidence with the team, then publish a story when it's ready. Meanwhile, keep covering events until you have something useful to say.
When you have a story worth telling or when an event needs whatever your working theory produces at that moment, publish it in Print and on Web. When you're covering events, forget about context. Just the facts. Use those to fill the news hole, either on the web or if there is a regular print pub, use that to fill the news hole as necessary.
To be clear, you don't publish the theory. You only publish those parts of the story that is supported by evidence.
Anyway, the real context of the story is created by the interaction of your readers with your words and pictures. That's the really hard part, IMHO.
Do you think this makes sense and is practical?
Michael Josefowicz
13 Feb 09 at 10:21 am
I have a lot of interest in this subject, reading here and the Nieman Lab site has got me thinking but….whenever I look into wiki sites, research into possibilities for using wiki software I keep running across dead links like one in this article – http://daviswiki.com/ – it's gone. Wiki type sites tend to start up, go nowhere much, and then die, faster and more often that other types of sites – just a thought.
Patung
13 Aug 09 at 4:06 pm
That's my bad, Patung. I had the wrong link in the post. It's DavisWiki.org, and it's very much alive and kicking.
mthomps00
13 Aug 09 at 8:35 pm