Wiki wiki
I lurked in a chatroom today that was devoted to discussing wikinews and blogging. It sounds as if bloggers would like to get feeds for wikinews stories.
[A wiki seems to be a great way to run a class. Take a look at this wiki from the Auburn University College of Architecture, Design and Construction. Mundane: have students sign up for office hours on a wiki.]
Back to the news — I like the idea of wikinews, but the entries I flipped through so far (very limited sample) seemed to suffer from the disease that afflicts sitcoms: anything written by committee is worse than it needs to be. The flat, affectless tone of the wikinews stories isn't appealing, and several seemed to be based on reporting done by mainstream sources. On the other hand, wikinews is just starting, and may provide a good place for independent reporting to be found.
I'd love it if wikis could be visual as well as textual. Why can't we see furious editing of a page as a pulse?
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If you've been reading the articles on Wikinews, you've probably read some of mine :).
We have to differentiate ourselves from the mainstream media and from bloggers, otherwise there'd be no point to the enterprise.
We try and avoid speculation and opinions (which are often misleading or plain incorrect), instead sticking to the facts and a neutral point of view. Of course, that does make for rather 'flat' articles! But that's the nature of the beast.
If you're interested, I have established a blog of the latest news items as an interim measure until RSS is built into the site here: http://wikinewslatestnews.blogspot.com/.