Mixed marks for wiki editors

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 September 2006 at 15:53
Tags: Journalism, Wikis

Wired News last week published a story that had been edited by the public as part of a week-long experiment with wikis — collaborative web sites open for anyone to edit.

By the time they were through with the copy filed by reporter Ryan Single (about the state of the art in wikis, naturally), the volunteer editors had had made 348 changes, suggested 21 headlines and added 30 links to external sources. One even supplied an additional interview.

Single concludes that the final version is more accurate than what he had filed, but doubts that it is better than what a traditional editor would have produced.

Single wrote: “The edits over the week lack some of the narrative flow that a Wired News piece usually contains. The transitions seem a bit choppy, there are too many mentions of companies, and too much dry explication of how wikis work.”

“I think the experiment shows that, in storytelling, there’s still a place for a mediator who knows when to subsume a detail for the sake of the story, and is accustomed to balancing the competing claims and interests of companies and people represented in a story.”

Other observers were also unimpressed by the “mass journalism” effort.

“Ryan’s original piece was neat, concise and to the point. Ryan is a journalist, so unsurprisingly it read like a professional piece,” wrote blogger Mike Cannon-Brookes, chief executive of software firm Atlassian. “[T]he edited article produced seems to be less precise and less insightful. It’s almost twice as long now – 1,000 words has become almost 1,900. In reading the new piece I don’t feel twice as informed at all.”

Update:  Wired editor Chris Anderson recently told me that he was open to editing magazine articles in the open, much like he produced his book, The Long Tail, with the help of the readers of his blog. Speaking to Frank Barnako of MarketWatch when the wiki experiment started, Anderson elaborated how this is an example of magazine publishing as an open-source collaborative project.

Tags: Journalism, Wikis