<![CDATA[Dan Gillmor writes about a critic of Wikipedia:
One critic is a Big University professor — a former professional journalist with significant online experience — whose class I visited recently as a guest lecturer. I was talking about Wikipedia, and he launched into a rant about its failings. In particular, he complained about the several inaccuracies in an article about a topic with which he was deeply familiar.
“So,” I asked, “did you fix them?”
“No,” he responded, “I don’t have time for that kind of thing.”
Talk about not getting it. No, we can’t make Wikipedia perfect. But we can improve it, which is the point.
This is the crux of the problem: Old media people don’t want to change and new media people assume change for change’s sake is invariably good. During the WikiNews chat last weekend, I got into an exchange with Jimmy Wales about the process by which final decisions are made about what is news and what is not news, because it contains errors. He said, basically, that the process worked find and sometimes those decisions just had to be made—by whom? I queried. “The editors,” he said. At that point, he made a statement that if I understood the Wikipedia process I would just get it—a kind of gnostic ‘once you know the secret knowledge you’ll accept its veracity’ argument, if you ask me.
What I want to know and have never gotten an answer to is how and who can decide to “lock” a story on WikiNews. The board looks for a “no point of view” quality in stories, which I think is their proxy for “objective.” That, however, is not objective and it demands an answer to the question of who defines the meaning of objectivity in coverage of a controversial topic.
I want a WikiNews to flower, I just want it to happen in a way that there is a form of accountability that a reader can apply to the copy they read. Mystical answers to the question of who decides what is objective enough to be news on WikiNews only compound the problem of finding reliable information.]]>