Wikipedia co-founder discusses WikiNews and attacks Indymedia

by Nighthawk Sat Jan 08, 2005 05:23

I would hazard a guess that before too long the wikinews site will be full of stuff copied and pasted from other websites. It will become a playspace for nazi trolls and conspiracy nuts.

by Terry Sun Jan 09, 2005 12:22

I don't know what makes him think it is so special and besides writing stories that don't upset anybody means nothing very challenging or controversal would be written. As the previous commentator pointed out, it won't be long before the right-wing nuts and Nazis set up camp at WikiNews

What is amazing is that the guy could be so incredibly naive.

by Michael Tippett - NowPublic.com Sun Jan 09, 2005 19:48 yes yes

Eveyone is entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. Evidence is more important than consensus. I say wiki but verify.

Michael.
NowPublic.com

by Paul Rice Mon Jan 10, 2005 08:07

I do not find Wales' comments to be a direct attack on indymedia as a news source. He simply states the fact that all news seems to be subjective, and offers the possibility of WikiNews as an entity that would allow for something more closely akin to objectivity than any other news source could ever offer.

He is also very open about the potentials for failure.
I think this is an interesting experiment, and should be examined more closely.

by Chekov Mon Jan 10, 2005 15:25

It's not really an attack on indymedia, just an attempt at a different approach. His thesis is that the best way of getting at the truth of an event is to force all the contributing journalists to agree on a single version of events - the need to keep everybody on board will theoretically ensure that the resulting article is 'objective' and fair and balanced and so on. Indymedia's basic premise is that, since objectivity is impossible, the best way to arrive at truth is to allow anybody to tell the story and leave it up to the reader to judge which tellings are the most plausible.

Personally I prefer the indymedia approach. The two big problems that I see is the likeliehood of many stories being reduced to the lowest common denominator - with all contested facts being removed, reducing all stories to a blandness which reflects the dominant ideology of the mainstream. Secondly, the authoring process requires each voice to be given weight. Whereas in indymedia land it is relatively easy to identify the lunatics and ignore their comments, in wiki-news their contribution will be incorporated into the text of the article and will be difficult if not impossible to seperate from the rest. For example, many wikipedia articles suffer from the fact that they include huge amounts of detail about relatively minor side issues - those that are disputed among the authors.

by gardener - "pest control" Sat Mar 19, 2005 11:01

Google are currently involved as you might now in a global library project offering improved access to texts and books for students online.
This is a very important part of "sanitisation" of the internet, so that she is more useful to humanity and more good stuff goes in and out either end.

Accordingly Google are in discussion with Wikipedia to (ahem) buy their pages.

This is front page news today in France-

the ogre google-
http://libe.com/page.php?Article=283690
related article on wiki france-
http://libe.com/page.php?Article=283691
related article from author perspective-
http://libe.com/page.php?Article=283696
related article on a monopolistic monster of IT -
http://libe.com/page.php?Article=283692

Indymedia is currently installing "bots" (clever pieces of code which restrict the ability of Google, to search and collate the gigabytes of opinion, data, background noise, original art work and text which the imc community have assembled these last years).
There are search engines which still can enter and browse all the sites, (which haven't pissed us off so much) so if you feel the need use one them instead.
It has been now been two years since we actively promoted google competitors, and inadvertently pushed up their value when the Google team accordingly bought them out.
But hey we're the borg.
we learn and do it better every time.

by Michael Sat Mar 19, 2005 11:32

Isn't Indymedia supposed to be an information clearinghouse too? Isn't part of the idea to get the word out to people who aren't involved in this or that campaign yet?

Removing your site from the Google index (by way of a simple "don't index me" tag or robots.txt file) will only serve to preserve Indymedia as a site exclusively for anarchists and other lefties, cops and other trolls.

by - Sat Mar 19, 2005 12:52

1. but we've traced (from some Imc sites) (i cant comment for ireland) breaches of our publishing code, abuses of copyleft/ creative commons and open content where people come in, and then sell what they find, thinking they can, or claim authorship of the material- which they cant.
This ranges from TV Radio broadcast to journalists to stand up comedians.
its an abuse of the horizontal communication platform by stretching it "too far", and is causing some new contributors personal grief, as they feel abused and short-changed.
We do everything we can to guarantee that copyleft / creative commons is understood, which is why there are explanatory buttons on all the screens.
"free for non commercial distribution" there are many important moral issues at work here, and it would be naive of anyone to think we are so naive as not to have had given this much thought long ago. And in some ways there is a "trust test" @ work.
2. we're anti google's monopoly.
3. we're protecting some of our long term contributors from additional hostile data trawling.
4. we're answering tactically to the rash of wiki sites which appear to be abusing the moral intent of the technology to provide free research to someone who then tries to "cash in", indeed this was a recent question asked of the politics.ie decision to set up a wiki based encylopedia. But it is worth remembering that information is such, that the "clearing" of it in the first place ought be designed to take horizontal communication into consideration. Thats cool. but the abuse isn't.

(I'm not speaking for ireland ask them through the contact box)

******************************************
Read the article above - Form your opinion
on Wikipedia "& co" and Google.
add comments

by Michael Sat Mar 19, 2005 15:01

There's nothing whatsoever radical about publishing something somewhere and saying "that's free for non-commercial use". In many countries that's already every citizen's right under "fair use" anyway. See the page footer on CommonDreams.org webpages for the US law references.

Nobody owns the term "copyleft", so Indymedia collectives are free to call whatever they like "copyleft".

For me though the term is about free speech, so I'd go with the GNU Project's definition which is something like this: Copyleft assures everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute your work, with or without modifications, either commercially or noncommercially. That means it's okay for a journalist to repeat what they've read online, so long as they allow their audience do the same again.

Regarding the Google boycott: I think that if as an alternative media collective you've decided on grounds of conscience to boycott Google, you may like to consider switching from online to offline media entirely. Indeed Indymedia Paris does a weekly FM radio show, and there are lots of leftwing publications to write for instead of Indymedia online.