The community that brought us the revolutionary online, peer-produced Wikipedia is now planning to create Wikinews. It will be a daring new experiment in peer-produced citizen-journalism.
Dan Gillmor says the project strikes him as naive. Joi Ito opposed it, but now that it looks like it's going ahead he says he'll do what he can to help it succeed. Others, like Ross Mayfield and Angela Beesley are enthusiastic supporters.
As somebody who has worked as a professional journalist for over a decade, but who also believes that greater democratization of the news media is necessary and good, I have a few thoughts about the Wikinews plan:
1. Neutrality: Can a wikinews really be neutral? In the discussion, the most prominently-cited models of citizen journalism are South Korea's OhMyNews and Indymedia. Neither of these is neutral. English-readers are more familiar with Indymedia's strong political activism. What non-Korean readers may not be aware of is that OhMyNews is also very political. It's reader/contributor community are strong supporters of South Korea's current president, Roh Moo-hyun and his Uri party. Ohmynews played a key role in getting Roh elected, and in making it politically impossible for his impeachment earlier this year to stick. Opposition party leaders talk about the "Ohmynews" people as a major obstacle to their political success. If you want to read English analysis of Ohmynews and its agendas visit the South Korea-based blogger, Marmot. He reads the thing in Korean every day. Ask him if he thinks Ohmynews is neutral.
I wonder if it's possible to expect volunteer reporters to be neutral. People who contribute to Wikipedia are contributing information they already have, because it's in their area of expertise. But what is the incentive - if you're not being paid - to go out and gather news? To go out and conduct interviews, investigate, travel, miss dinner with your family, get harrassed by security guards for poking your nose into none-of-your business, (and in some countries, get detained by police) etc.? It would seem to be that the main reason for bothering with all of this would be a burning desire to expose something you think the public needs to know. An environmental abuse, a human rights abuse, a police beating, outrageous corruption by a politician, a cool new social phenomenon, a great scientific development, or whatever. Your choice of focus is naturally going to be biased, and if you're Republican, you're going to want to expose what you think is under-exposed bad behavior by democrats, and if you're a Democrat, it's vice versa.
Why do people blog? Because they can advance their agendas or personal interests in some way. There's a reason why blogs aren't objective - especially ones people aren't paid to write.
In the end, neutrality and objectivity are myths anyway. They're ideals journalists strive for and never reach. One of the reasons why blogs have had such great appeal is that the authors are open about their biases. That way you can triangulate what they're telling you and know what context to put it in - something that's hard to do with mainstream news media, which claim to be objective, "fair and balanced", or whatever, when they really aren't. Wikinews will lose a lot of credibility very quickly if it claims to be neutral and objective, but ends up being perceived as having a liberal, or American, or whatever bias.
If a wikipedia reporter who reports on environmental issues also works for the Sierra Club. I want to know that. Or if they work for an auto company, I want to know that. If your citizen-reporters pay their rent with other jobs, it will be almost impossible to avoid conflicts of interest. Then there are the personal issues. If a wikinews environmental reporter's aunt died of cancer from polluted ground water, I would like to know. A mainstream media environmental reporter doesn't generally disclose his or her personal agendas (and being human we can't avoid having them no matter what story we're covering, if we're honest with ourselves). This is a huge failing of mainstream news media, in my view, and contributes to the erosion of public trust.
And let's be honest here. Wikipedia DOES have bias -- a white, male, developed-world bias -- in the topics its members choose to write about. As my colleague Ethan Zuckerman likes to point out, Wikipedia has a lot more information about Tolkien's Middle Earth than it does about most of Africa. If that isn't bias, I don't know what is.
Maybe a better approach, rather than claiming to be neutral or unbiased - which is a loaded claim - is to say that wikinews reflects the point-of-view and reporting abilities of its members ... so if you don't like what it's reporting, join it and contribute what you think will be better reports.
2. Speed of reporting: It's going to be hard to present yourself as an alternative news source to AP and Reuters unless you can compete with them on speed of reporting. They turn breaking stories around in minutes sometimes. Then of course you've got all kinds of live broadcast reporting. I find it hard to imagine that Wikinews' story-editing-by-committee approach would be very fast. News often happens at inconvenient times when people aren't in their office or at their computers - and are hard to reach unless they've got the journalists' habit of never going anywhere without their cellphone, blackberry, etc. News organizations that are best at covering breaking news are not consensus-driven democracies. They are run by brilliant autocratic editors who make tough decisions very fast. Decisions about when a story is ready to run, when to authorize tens of thousands dollars to cover a breaking story within minutes after the story breaks, etc.
Suggestions:
This leads me to think that Wikinews may be best suited not so much for breaking news than for in-depth investigative reporting. These are the kinds of stories that mainstream news media increasingly do not have the time or budgets to support. But strong, hard-hitting, factually accurate investigative reporting is vitally important if you want citizens of a democratic society to be properly informed.
If I was advising Wikinews I would probably suggest focusing on 2 areas: 1. Investigative reporting of stories not yet taken up by the mainstream press; 2. Breaking news that Reuters & AP, etc. aren't reporting, but which the wikinews community thinks is important. 3. Alternative angles on stories that the wikinews community thinks the mainstream media didn't get right. I would not suggest trying to be a comprehensive total-news service at the beginning. I would focus on filling the holes that the mainstream fails to fill - and from time to time proving that the wiki community reporting can catch important stuff the mainstream media misses. As a consumer of news, that's where I would find value in Wikinews. Especially in the beginning when I'd be more inclined to look at more familiar (and faster) news sources first before checking out Wikinews.
Rebecca, very well put. I've been involved with the discussions about Wikinews from the very beginning, and I admire the spirit of the project and the person who initiated it, Erik Moeller.
However, if "neutral" is elusive in the Wikipedia format, which is highly structured, narrowly defined and without a deadline, then doing a "news" product is nearly impossible. I agree, it is best pursued on a macro level by allowing anyone to sign up to be involved in the team, and not chasing after a mythical idea of being neutral in every article.
Instead, we should look to other successes. I think there is excellent "reporting" done in places like the DailyKOS Diaries, where people stream in dispatches and discoveries, and stories are rated up by members in a Darwinian form of peer review. (Interestingly, they have also started a dKosopedia, inspired by Wikipedia.) In the English language blogosphere, that is the closest to OhMyNews today in terms of an active, interrogative community of news hounds.
-Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
Posted by: Andrew Lih | October 29, 2004 at 03:17 AM
Rebecca, I was most interested by the arguments you gave.
I am personally opposed to WikiNews as currently proposed, for a whole set of arguments. Some of these absolutely rejoin your opinion, but I also found new insightful ideas in your post.
In particular the point dealing with "why would editors take care of breaking news" (which would incidently very likely imply that those be paid, which would change the voluntary principle).
I have many reasons to oppose right now. I think it will divide forces, in particular in projects with small communities (I only perceive english and german languages able to support yet another project).
Nearly 4 years of experience with NPOV show that time is an absolute requirement to reach neutrality. Time and multiple contributions. An article frozen after a week is not compatible with the way NPOV built. And as you mention, breaking news are such an exciting event, that it is required to hurry. Hence limited number of contributors and limited calm spirit.
Another point might greatly damage our image. Till now, our defense in front of copyright violations, diffaming accusations and other nice legal points, is to answer to the complainer that "he can edit the article now", or that "the image will be immediately removed". This wont be possible with a frozen article.
In the current proposal, the article may be edited by many, but will have to be "approved" by an editorial commitee, which very likely, will be a limited number of informed people. The less numerous the "approvers" are, the more risk there is of bias.
And finally, the "approved" editor allowing the article to be published will be put very much in the light, will possibly become famous, even though he might not have written a word of the article. It seems this could develop a feeling of two classes of editors, the "famous one", and those invisible doing the work. I believe this to be possibly very hurting for the community and very contrary to our principles of openness, equality and dialog between contributors.
A point I also fear is that journalists are mostly those who help the project (Wikipedia) to become well known.
Walking on the toes of press people is not likely to gain us friends. I would prefer that more journalists are part of such a project, so that we gain better insight of what will be best.
As such, your suggestions at the bottom of your comment are very interesting to me.
Anthere
Posted by: Anthere | October 29, 2004 at 04:34 PM
Your suggestions are great. #1 sounds like a novel use of parallel reporting power, and #2 (for better of worse) covers what most of the initial reporting is likely to be. But if you're still thinking in terms of 'angles' on stories, you are missing one of the strengths of this particular wiki tradition. What wikinews should be able to do better than any other news source, is provide a global perspective on what is important; contextualize all of the major angles on a story; and expose the revision process involved in newsmaking, highlighting the aspects of news reports that are hotly contested.
As for the aside about Middle Earth getting better coverage in the encyclopedia than most of Africa, that puts it a bit too strongly. I feel bad that the source of these claims is right here in my backyard, so I've tried to set things straight on my blog.
(In a nutshell: the encyclopedia's Middle-earth content is unusually comprehensive, and its Africa content imperfect, but there is still vastly more and better content about Africa.)
Many contributors to Wikipedia are not contributing in their area of expertise, but researching new things and filling article requests. They are guided in their contributions by the shared ideal of a perfect encyclopedia: neutral and comprehensive.
Likewise, the initial contributors to a Wikinews project will start with what they know best -- local news, and content from their personal point of view. As the number of contributors grows, however, the content will move away from being what any one contributor would write on his or her private blog, towards a shared ideal of the perfect news source. In this case, I hope that ideal would be "a neutral source offering a balanced perspective on news from all over the world, describing all of the major angles on each topic".
Posted by: Samuel Klein | October 30, 2004 at 06:28 AM
Rebecca,
Your "thoughts about Wikinews" are the most coherent I've seen yet (regarding Wikinews). As always, thanks for your thoughts!
My guess is that news reports generated collaboratively in this way will evolve to fill several news niches not adequately covered by other news organizations. Hyper-local news and perpetually-ignored topics, as you suggest, immediately come to mind (although editing and fact checking these kinds of stories may present problems).
You alluded to the desirability of some sort of disclosure that would cast light on the writer's potential biases. ("If a wikinews environmental reporter's aunt died of cancer from polluted ground water, I would like to know.") That is certainly a worthy goal. Perhaps the writer's profile--sort of a cross between an eBay-style ranking, brief bio and a link to "other stories by this author"--may suffice.
You also acknowledge that true objectivity is an almost-impossible achievement that professional journalists strive for anyway. Many years ago my brother was struck and killed by a car while he attempted to cross a road. That terrible event didn't turn me into an anti-car fanatic. But it may have given me the willingness to allow myself an expanded view on some of the negative consequences of our society's reliance on this form of transportation.
So if I were to report on a car wreck in my community that resulted in death or serious injury, would it be irresponsible of me to include in the story that 42,815 people were killed in auto accidents in 2002? (Source Car-Accidents.com.) If I were to do the math and point out that this works out to roughly 3568 automobile-related fatalities every month--more than the total fatalities caused by the 9/11 attacks--would that be going too far? And if I then connected the dots and reminded readers that our economy depends on access to an abundant supply of cheap energy, much of it used to fuel our transportation habits (hence our invasion of Iraq to secure that much-needed access), would that finally drive me off the cliff of responsible reporting?
Idle academic speculation is not my motivation here. My quarrel with how we've traditionally approached "objectivity" in journalism is that it seems, all-too-often, to leave us focused on the small picture, even if that image is connected to a much bigger reality begging for our attention. We all know how a vibrant Fourth Estate can inform and energize a community, and thus contribute fundamentally to a free and open society. With our democracy currently in tatters, nothing seems more urgent to me than re-thinking how we inform ourselves so that the information we get is more relevant, contextual and whole.
Posted by: David Myers | November 30, 2004 at 03:30 AM
I think this is an open minded approach. Of course, it was BEFORE Wikinews actually got into action. However, now that we can see the empirical reality of WikiNews, I must say that sociologically WikiNews is doomed to shrink and eventually disintigrate if nothing very special happens.
Now that it has actually been in operation, those who have even cursively participated in writing or judging articles will notice the autocractic culture so typical of the IRC milieu in its days of decline. As we all know, it's easy to be a despot on the Internet, when the worst that could happen is that someone takes the time and trouble to do a socket check. And unfortunately, this social phenomenon appears to be present in the WikiNews community as elsewhere on the net.
Competition will in my opinion be an important factor in doing what can be done to ensure WikiNews doesn't become insular, stagnant and completely insensative to users' opinions. But as with every community, its survivle will ultimately depend upon how will editors, admins and users command the art of human relations.
Posted by: Hans | June 02, 2007 at 07:49 AM