Wikis and the news
On August 5, 2006 (Saturday) at 4:00-5:30 PM there will be an open discussion and workshop on Wikinews, and the use of wikis in citizen journalism in particular. You can use this page to indicate your interest, affiliation, and topics you would like to discuss in advance before the sesssion. The first half of the session, focusing on Wikinews, will be moderated by Erik Möller (Eloquence), while Dan Gillmor will discuss the potential of wikis as a general tool for journalists in the second half. However, the precise topics to be discussed will be decided on the spot.
Please also note the Citizen Journalism event that will take place on August 7.
If possible, we will try to assign one or multiple people for reporting the discussion to #wikinews on irc.freenode.net, and to take questions and comments from the channel.
Wikinewsies
Please add your name here if you are a Wikinews editor and you intend to attend this session.
Others interested in using wikis for journalism
Add your name here if you are not a Wikinews editor, but intend to attend this session.
- Raines Cohen, ePluribusMedia contributor, videoblogging from the front of the room
- ...
Topics to discuss
Wikinews
- How to make Wikinews more attractive to first time readers
- How to motivate people to produce original reporting
- Technical requirements of the project
- Podcasting, videos
- Building a physical presence, cooperating with citizen radio projects
- Are readers interested in neutral news ?
- How to have a better cooperation between Wikipedia and Wikinews ?
- How to share multimédia content between all Wikinews not accepted by Commons ?
- How can press releases be communicated to Wikinews ?
- Newspapers usually have a place for book, movie and music critics, but this is not possible in Wikinews due to its NPOV policy. Is this not a problem for first time readers ?
- Wikinews, unlike all tv-news or newpapers, can't publish short or brief news. Wikipédia can publish brief news. Is it not strange siuation as it's more easy to write short text for beginner than a full featured article ?
- Wikipedia appears to keep up with current news very well. how can wikinews attract the wikipedians who update articles with current news.
- How can we further expand Wikinews' reach in non web based media (print,audio,video, pdas, cell phones)
- What makes WikiNews unique?
- Unlike AP, it's free (in multiple senses of the word, each of which has value to people aggregating news and republishing it on their own sites).
- And WikiNews can uniquely post questions and get the readers involved in helping do research and answer questions and pose new ones to direct the story evolution and create spinoffs -- I saw this done well with the Daily Kos blog in the GannonGate investigative coverage that led to the creation of ePluribusMedia --Raines, adding a comment I didn't get to make in the session).
- Add your ideas
Wikis and journalism
- Examples of Wiki journalism
- Congresspedia
- Metavid -- system for searching video source material
- Journalism.wikia.org -- wiki about journalism; topics include lists of newspapers, journalistic ethics, objectivity and bias, jobs
- Using wikis to prepare stories together
- Wiki/blog combinations
- Add your ideas