That's the question Simon Waldman asks about Wikipedia, in a Guardian feature story today, "Who knows?"

"It has no editors, no fact checkers and anyone can contribute an entry - or delete one," Waldman writes. " It should have been a recipe for disaster, but instead Wikipedia became one of the internet's most inspiring success stories."

The Guardian's trumpeting Wikipedia's success would seem to indicate that people will accept a radically new approach to developing authoritative information sources on the Web by enabling thousands of people to collaborate and pool their knowledge.

Waldman's article makes fascinating reading, with facts and figures and anecdotes about the massive Wikipedia project. Here's an excerpt:

To put Wikipedia's achievements in numerical context, at the same time it was celebrating the publishing of its one millionth entry (a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag) in less than four years, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography launched its latest edition. It had taken 12 years to complete, yet contained a comparatively tiddly 55,000 biographies. It also cost some £25m to create. Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around £300,000.

The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day.

The same phenomenon that enables political bloggers to prove or disprove statements made by the Bush and Kerry campaigns works to keep the Wikipedia free of error, but it's a process that takes time.

Perhaps this collaborative knowledge work is even better suited to the rhythm and pace of breaking news, with its inherent need for frequent updates as more facts emerge about a particular story?

Wikipedia is betting yes, with the announcement of Wikinews, "a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view."

From the Wikinews mission statement:

On January 15, 2001, a group of people started a daring experiment: They let the whole world create an encyclopedia in all languages, freely available to everyone on the planet, forever. In the following months and years, it was not just technology that made this dream a reality, but also an incredibly dedicated community of volunteers who wrote articles and formulated the policies and guidelines for the project. They did so through an open, evolutionary process, in a belief in the possibility of consensus, in a desire for the betterment of the human condition, and in love of the human spirit.

The idea behind the Wikinews project is no less daring. We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

We seek to promote the idea of the citizen journalist, because we believe that everyone can make a useful contribution to painting the big picture of what is happening in the world around us. The time has come to create a free news source, by the people and for the people. We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to change the world forever.

Excuse me, but was somebody saying something about the Web being completely taken over by profit-minded suits and their bean-counter battalions?

Links:

Wikinews a new news service open to all contributors.

Who knows? by Simon Waldman, Guardian, 26 October 2004

Wikimedia Main Page, with links to Wikimedia and other projects

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