June 17, 2006
Editing in the Blogosphere
By
Katherine Dodds
Today's New York Times Headlines (that conveniently pop up in my inbox around 4am PST every day) has one that caught my eye: Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy.
While in standard attention-grabbing style the headline seemed to herald some dire changes the article really just reinforced that Wikipedia's astonishing success –as the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
Relative to corporate controlled media conglomerates the volunteer-run editorial policies of Wikipedia speak more to the old-fashioned ethics of the “true” journalist — those of neutrality and the citing reasonable sources.
The other point that interested me, is that a core group of dedicated volunteers does the bulk of this volunteer editing. Sound familiar? Oh those of you involved in any kind of vast social-impact project?!
So as the soap box potential of the every blog-for-herself blogosphere grows (and don't get me wrong, I love it), the sum of these parts is a potentially vaster and even more anarchic Wikipedic explosion. And the only cure for the inherent vulnerability of Op-Ed remains as it always has been – a vibrant culture that values context, creativity, and critique.
Which of course is one of the things that I want.
Are we there yet?
Kat
Tag(s):
Hello Cool World,
Blogging,
Technology
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On June 19, 2006 at 06:02 PM David Griffith wrote:
Great post Kat!
Katherine Dodds AKA "Kat" is the founder of Good Company Communications and HelloCoolWorld.com. Trained in renegade advertising & branding through her work with Adbusters in the '90s, Kat's early induction into the possibilities of the web-world was inspired by the term hypertext, which she immediately found comforting. She is dedicated to cause-related communication and to the development and use of tools that promote democratic processes.
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