Tech Explorer

I first spotted a link to an article on the Library Stuff blog. The article is entitled “All the News That’s Fit to Print Out” and is on the New York Times website. The article, by Jonathan Dee, explores an interesting aspect of Wikipedia. In essence the Wikipedia website is designed to be an encyclopaedia and the article suggests that it is becoming more popular as a source of news as well.

This raises some interesting questions including:

• If more news appears on Wikipedia, what is the role of Wikinews?
• How does this affect the role of the more traditional media and their websites?
• Is the disintermediation of news like this a good thing?

There are a small number of stories in the article about the way the community around Wikipedia shapes these articles and the way in which volunteer users contribute vast amounts of time to work on articles. It is this community aspect that is the most interesting to me.

It was an interesting article to read.