articles of unflattering facts
Over on bOINGbOING, there’s a post that lauds Wikinews’ efforts to document the disingenuous edits that some congressional staffers have made on articles about their bosses. Xeni says, “Wikinews seems to be doing a much better job at connecting the data dots than some of the larger commercial news organizations covering the story — not because Wikinews volunteers have access to facts that other reporters do not, but because they appear to be looking harder for them.” I think we need to define “access.” The facts in question - such as IP addresses of computers used for editing - are certainly publicly available, but I’m not sure they’re completely accessible. In my own research on Wikipedia, it took time for me to develop a level of Wikipedia literacy to understand how the project operates. I don’t think you can expect a political reporter or a generalist to know how to find the “history” page and be able to decode the information while working under deadline. It’s not a function of reportorial laziness, but a function of time spent participating on the site and knowledge needed to analyze the available information. In this case, we probably need to think about “access” in the sense of a poem being “accessible.” Reporters won’t have the cultural and technical knowledge to access this information, while a teeming horde of Wikiheads and bloggers will.
I couldn’t agree more.
Every field of endeavor requires expertise, and reporters of all types have to be quick on their feet to pick up enough information quickly to report with any level of accuracy and understanding.
Still, any internet or tech reporter should know what an IP is, and how to find who owns it. And every Wikipedia page has a nice big link at the top which says “history”.
We got lucky, the ball was in our court when it bounced. It still took us more than a week of research to pull this story together. It might have taken a lot longer without a good collection of tech skills and familiarity with MediaWiki software.
I’m thinking that it isn’t that reporters don’t have “access”; more they aren’t given the time (or resources) to work full time for that long on one story.
Amgine