Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Wikipedia: To cite or not to cite

CyberJournalist.net hones in on an excellent point that Jimmy Wales makes in an interview with BusinessWeek.

In response to a question about whether students and researchers should cite Wikipedia, Wales says:

No, I don't think people should cite it, and I don't think people should cite Britannica, either -- the error rate there isn't very good. People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it's more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet.

It's really a key point: Some people put down Wikipedia for its inaccuracies. (Although Nature just came out with a report saying it is almost on par with Britannica on science entries.) But that misses what Wikipedia is all about. It's a place to start your research. Don't count on it as being correct, but realize that more often than not it is.

The internet is full of misinformation. At least Wikipedia has built a system that has a degree of accountability -- anyone can correct others' errors -- unlike most of what we run across on the web.

More wikitorial post-mortems

Jeff Jarvis' "three critical mistakes" hits the mark in analyzing where the LA Times went wrong with the wikitorial: (1) collaboration vs. argument, (2) care and feeding, (3) newspaper ego.

The Times' own story today says the LATimes.com may try to resurrect the wikitorial.

New York Times: Postings of Obscene Photos End Free-Form Editorial Experiment

LA Times whacks the wikitorial

The LA Times pulled the curtains on its wikitorial experiment for now because of "inappropriate material." The wiki also seemed unworkable for an opinion piece, at least the way the LA Times set it up, and that may be the real reason it went down so fast.

Here are some thoughts about what went wrong with the wikitorial: Buzz Machine, Long Tail, Many-to-Many, Slashdot.

More on wikis

LA Times launches the wikitorial

The LA Times this morning debuted its first wikitorial, "War and Consequences." Er, make that "War & Consequences," as the "and" in the original has been edited to an ampersand -- at least for now.

As feared, the Times is using the typical wiki format, limiting though it does limit the editing only to registered users. It's hard to imagine this process producing any added value on an opinion piece, but I'm certainly willing to watch this wikitorial experiment evolve before passing final judgment.

Even the Times notes, in A Wiki for Your Thoughts, that this model may have problems:

To be sure, encyclopedias and newspaper editorials are very different literary forms. Contributors to Wikipedia share in some general way a commitment to accuracy. By contrast, strong disagreement is built into the concept of an editorial. Plenty of skeptics are predicting embarrassment; like an arthritic old lady who takes to the dance floor, they say, the Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than to be hip. We acknowledge that possibility.

I've got to think that the suggestions of Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, would have made for a better wiki as applied to an editorial.

Word count: The original Times editorial was 1,064 words (according to MS Word's word count). The current edited version is at 1,767.

UPDATE: Editor&Publisher interviews Michael Kinsley about the launch.

A different take on the LA Times 'wikitorial'

Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, offers some good ideas of how the LA Times' wikitorial concept might work. He suggests variations that differ from the wiki free-for-all that I was envisioning and suspect would be unworkable.

Niles writes:

Talk of wikis inevitably elicit rants about Wikipedia, the free-for-all dictionary where users can create and revise entries, even to the point of rewriting history. Neither (Editorial Page Editor Andrés) Martinez nor (Opinion Editor Michael) Kinsley have publicly revealed details of how their "wikitorials" will work. But the Wikipedia model need not be the only one to guide wiki publishers.

• At OJR, we restrict editing access on our wikis to our registered users, who must provide a working e-mail address to register.

• A news publisher could limit write access on the wiki to an invited group of readers with first-hand experience on a topic.

• Or, a publisher could adopt an "open source journalism" model, opening a wiki to revision for a limited time, with an editor stitching together the best evidence and arguments from its versions for later print publication.

I'd like to see those second and third options in action.

LA Times' wikitorials concept already stirring skepticism

The LA Times on Sunday announced a couple new avenues -- a "Thinking Out Loud" feature and wikitorials -- for editorial page readers to enter the dialogue.

The description of the wikitorials is sketchy -- "an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials" -- so reaction has been based on speculation as to how this concept will work:

• Ross Mayfield, posting at Many2Many, notes that wikis work best on unfinished reference material and suggests this experiment could lead to edit wars.
• Ernest Miller suggests that perhaps the Times is planning wikis that will fork into two or more different viewpoints.
• Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly says, "It seems like interactivity just for the sake of interactivity."

Michael Kinsley, LA Times editorial and opinion editor, told the New York Times (registration required), "It may be a complete mess but it's going to be interesting to try. Wikitorials may be one of those things that within six months will be standard. It's the ultimate in reader participation."

While I share some of the skepticism about how a wikitorial will work -- I echo Mayfield's comment about the wiki being best suited to reference material -- I'd rather see a news site experimenting than doing nothing. Even if this effort fails, the LA Times will have learned some tricks that it can use in its next experiment.