[Commons-Law] Wikinews

[anu]

Check out the widipedia's news collaborative news reporting service!
It raises a few questions in my mind, I would like to raise here. May
be its the new dawn of new age in news reporting, but I am always
skeptical about the reliability in the long run of such
'commons-based' efforts in making of systematic public domain like
encyclopedia and news-reporting.
anuranjan


http://www.hindu.com/biz/2004/12/13/stories/2004121301821700.htm


Wikinews: News service with collaborative reporting 



WIKIPEDIA HAS proved beyond doubt that rich content can be easily
generated through collaborative authoring/editing. Wikimedia
Foundation, the mentor of Wikipedia, has recently launched another
innovative project that aims to generate a free news source using the
concept of collaborative reporting.

A drawback of the current news media is that it fails to look at many
news items/issues. Also, they rake up issues and after a while just
forget about it — no follow up, no further research.

This shortcoming can be attributed to several factors that include
`media interests,' subject-specific approach of established media that
limits the nature of its content and so on.

Rather than assigning the responsibility of public information
dissemination to a minority, if we have a mechanism that provides an
opportunity for each of the citizens to report news on any of the
issues, it will certainly be more effective.

The new on-line news service, Wikinews
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page), sponsored by Wikimedia
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home), is an attempt to implement
this concept.

According to its web site, the objective of Wikinews is to "create a
diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report
the news on a wide variety of current events." Here, anyone can report
on any event from anywhere on the Net. Being a service developed on
the Wiki model, this article can be edited/modified by anyone who
reads it. So, though the service allows any person to take up the role
of a reporter, he has to be ready to see his piece being mercilessly
edited by others. That is, over time, the report content may undergo
drastic changes.

The reporter has to make sure that his story has enough news value and
reliability to withstand the scrutiny of other fellow `citizen'
reporters.

It is likely that this unruly nature of the service turns out to be a
recipe for its complete failure.

To save the service from getting out of control, the Wikinews
developers have introduced a review process
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Article_stages). The articles
available on the site fall under various categories such as `Articles
in Development,' `Unreviewed articles,' `Reviewed' and so on.

Wikinews may not succeed on all aspects of the news creation process. 

For example, as can be seen from its site, it will be difficult for
the service to provide the latest sensational news on time. However,
the service may turn out to be a good model for news stories that need
to be followed up further with a little bit of research/analysis.

It is likely that the review process enriches the story's content
further and makes it more accurate. In this respect, Wikinews may
emerge as an important news source for researchers. Anyway, we need to
wait and see how this novel experiment will evolve.

Bibliography 

management service 


Compiling a bibliography and presenting it in a standard format is one
of the essential skills you need if you are in academics or a writer.

To help you manage the various aspects of bibliographic list creation
process with ease, several tools are available. Here, we will have a
look at a simple free PHP-based bibliography management service that
can be easily implemented on your desktop or on a web server with
PHP/MySQL support.

Wikindx 


Wikindx (pronounced as Wiki Index) is a bibliography management
software that enables you to create bibliographies through a web-based
interface. To create a bibliography, you just need to fill up the
input form with several fields that include `Title of the resource,'
`Type of resource' (Book, Journal Article, Newspaper/Magazine article
and so on) and `Publisher Details.' Once the required information is
fed to the system it will add the resource entry into your
bibliographic database.

The database thus created can be retrieved in multiple ways using
various search techniques; it can also be exported to different file
formats that include RTF (Rich Text Format), BibTex and so on.

Another notable feature of this tool is that more than one user can be
allowed to create bibliographies. Also, the system allows each user to
view the bibliographies created by other users. That is, the product
can be used to establish a collaborative bibliography creation
infrastructure.

As already mentioned, to implement the service you need to have access
to a web server with PHP/MySQL support.

If you are a Windows user who would like to implement the system on
your desktop, first, set-up the server component on your machine. For
this, you may use the free WAMP (Window-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server
module available at: http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php.

Once the server is configured on your system, download Wikindx
archive, expand/store it on to a directory (say `wikindx') in the web
server's document root. Create a database and make necessary
adjustments in the configuration file as mentioned in the `Install'
file that comes along with the archive. Once the set-up is ready, you
can start the bibliography creation process by accessing the service
using the link: http://localhost/wikindx.

If you want to test the features of Wikindx, access the service's
`Test-Drive' (http://wikindx.sourceforge.net/) option.

On-line notebook 


For conducting daily life efficiently, many people keep a note of
important events, meetings to be attended and other tasks to be
performed.

If you are a project team member, you may be keen to have a common
note that can be viewed/added/edited by any of the team members.
Obviously, if we keep such notes on the Net we can access them
anytime, anywhere.

Those of you who want to keep such on-line notes, check out the free
service, `Forty Internet' (http://www.fortyinternet.com/notebook/).

After registering with the service, you can start creating notes and
sub-notes through its simple web interface.


J. Murali 


Email the author at: 
murali27 at satyam.net.in