Sunday, July 01, 2007

Wikipedia, breaking news and the five pillars: a NY Times examination whose material cites a person called Shreveport Paranormal

NY Times writer Jimmy Dee on Wikipedia: "Wikipedia, as nearly everyone knows by now, is a six-year-old global online encyclopedia in 250 languages that can be added to or edited by anyone. (“Wiki,” a programming term long in use both as noun and adjective, derives from the Hawaiian word meaning “quick.”) Wikipedia’s goal is to make the sum of human knowledge available to everyone on the planet at no cost. Depending on your lights, it is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards."

In an article for the Sunday Magazine, All the News Thats Fit to Print Out, Dee explores the culture of editorship associated with the encyclopedia.

Wikipedia has recently become a source for news. Dee says, " Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information."

The guardians of Wikipedia's accuracy, the vandalism hunters, the culture of neutrality; how has Wikipedia become a center for the golden mean? And how young are the administrators?

Dee follows - as you and I can - the themes of Wikipedia's administrators through the Discussion Pages that log their deliberations.

"And then there is the notion of the neutral point of view. It’s easy to forget how far out of fashion that idea has fallen, particularly in the Wild West milieu of the Internet. The N.P.O.V. is one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars. When asked why that neutrality is something whose value they’ve internalized so deeply, some of the admins I talked to used a rather neutral word themselves: information freed from opinion, they said, is “useful,” where information burdened by it is not. But it doesn’t take much digging to see that the question has a moral component as well."

Shreveport Paranormal, a teen, becomes an exemplar of the Wikipedia ethic in Dee's closing. The discussion over coverage of the death of Jerry Falwell was the topic in which he posted. Though far from being a Falwell fan, he argued that the reporting should be scrupulous: "The only way we can keep to the purpose of Wikipedia is to remain unbiased.”

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