User:Regebro~enwikinews

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Regebro

Fun Trivia: I got quoted in New York Times article on Wikinews.

The document stages are now removed, so the main reason for the following text is gone. But the text in itself are still interesting, I think, so it stays.

Embrace the Wiki

I notice that many people in the discussions tend to forget that this is a Wiki. As such, it differs enormously from other news channels. Some of the major differences are:

• Articles are constantly changeable. This is true for all on-line media of course, but still most news sources do not use that feature. That's because many of the are tied to paper-news. They then need to write one article and publish it. As soon as it hits the paper, it's there. It can't be changed. On-line news isn't like that, here articles are changeable for ever. The effects of this are numerouos:
  • You can write an article and constantly updated and amend and correct it. Many of the discussions and suggestions for improvements forget this. You don't have to, as a news paper has to, write a new article to cover new developments. Instead, you add it to the already existing article.
  • It also means that an approving process immediately gets defeated. More on this in the "We don't need document stages" section.
  • Articles have no clearcut date. They can cover events that stretch over years, they can still be updated and amended a long time after they were written, and even be written before the event.

• Articles are changeable by anyone. This is the whole idea with wikimedia. It has huge effects:
  • The major benefit is that anybody can go in and add knowledge, correct mistakes, reword the article to better english and so on. This is the whole point of having a wiki of course.
  • But that in turn means that there is no clear authorship.
  • It also means that anyone can approve articles and that anyone can disprove articles.

We don't need document stages

The Wiki review process has been working quite nice on the other Wikimedia sites, I see no reason why we should throw out that experience with Wikinews. Wikinews should start out with the same review process as all other wikimedia sites: People changing things that are wrong, and handling the conflicts of opinion when they happen.

Nothing else is needed. In fact, anything else may be directly damaging. The current review process is an example of that. It is centered around the idea that articles should be approved. But:

A wiki defeats any approval process (and vice versa)

Since anybody can approve and article, and anybody can write in the comments "looks fine to me" an "reviewed stamp" means nothing. It is not a guarantee of anything. Having a reviewed stamp therefore in most cases are a false certificate that makes claims of authority and reliability that is not there. Approval stamps require authority and accountability. An open wiki has neither.

Also remember that articles can be changed at any time. If the article was approved the 5th, and changed the 8th, those changes are not reviewed but it will still have the approved stamp! An approval process, which the current review process is, must lock the article after it gets approved, or the whole approvement process is pointless. But what happens if we lock the articles? well, then it's not freely editable anymore, and all the benefits of a wiki gets thrown out the door! That doesn't seem very constructive...

The truth is hard to find, but lies are easy to spot

The current review process is based on people vouching for the accuracy and truthfulness of the article. That is based on a misunderstanding of how collective knowledge works. Basically, any review process are specialized versions of the biggest review process of them all: the scientific process. It's based on a couple of principles and one of them are the principle of falsifyability and the idea that you start with making theories and then proving them wrong. Basically, it is usually much easier to prove something wrong than prove something right.

As a parallell to that, it's much easier to spot errors in an article than it is to spot the truth. The result of that is that the review process should not try to spot accuracy or spot truth, it should try to spot the errors. This is what the wikipedia review process does, and it has worked beautifully. The review process for wikinews should be based on wikipedias and take the knowledge amd experience into account. The current one does not, and it's made for paper media, not a wiki.

Wikinews can not have editorials

Good editorials are thought provoking, and almost always biased and opinionating. But wikis are about collective authoring. And the point of collective authoring is to reach a collective concensus, to tap the collective knowledge. So, you can not opinionate or do analyzing in a wiki unless everybody have the same basic viewpoint, which of course will never happen.

Can you claim your right to your editorial? No, there is no article ownership. What happens if you write a good, thougt provoking, opinionating editorial? Somebody that do not agree will change it, and it gets the arguments and conclusion changed, and it will stop being good and thought provoking, although most likely it will still be opinionating. About something else. You can change it back of course, but that will only result in an editwar. Or, you can just remove opinions from the article to stop the editwar, but then it stops being an editorial.

This can only be prevented by not allowing editing of editorials. Again, that means throwing out all the benefits of a wiki. In addition it means we need to approve the authors of editorials as being good and thought provoking. And that means we need to decide what is thought provoking and what is a just a heap of stupid crap. This mostly depends on your standpoint on different issues. So, to have good editorials, Wikinews need a political standpoint! Well, personally, I'm all for declaring that Wikinews should promote globalisation, liberal democracy and capitalism, but I don't see how that is gonna be accepted generally. ;)

Summary

Notice how both the idea of editorials and the idea of an approval-centered review process ends up with the same thing: Locking articles for editing, assigning article ownership and implementing a publishing workflow. Of course, all of these things are possible, but what do we have then? Only a news site, like any other. We have authors that write articles that get approved by editors that publish the articles who then stay static for eternity. It is no longer Wikinews, it is Whatevernews, and none of the benefits of an open wiki are no longer possible.

This is not a daily paper. This is not a weekly magazine. This is not a TV channel. It's wiki, and as such Wikinews can revolutionize news reporting in the same way as wikipedia revolutionized encyclopedias. Don't fight it, work with it and embrace the wiki.