People do often come to Wikipedia when major news is breaking. This is not our primary intention, but of course it happens. The reason that it happens is that the traditional news organizations are not doing a good job of filling people in on background information. People come to us because we do a better job at meeting their informational needs.

Jason Fry adds further analysis today in a piece about rethinking sports reporting:

It’s a quietly devastating indictment of journalism. And Wales is absolutely right, for reasons explored very capably a couple of months back by Matt Thompson. Arrive at the latest newspaper story about, say, the health-care debate and you’ll be told what’s new at the top, then given various snippets of background that you’re supposed to use to orient yourself. Which is serviceable if you’ve been following the story (though in that case you’ll know the background and stop reading), but if you’re new you’ll be utterly lost — you’ll need, to quote Thompson, “a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns”. On Wikipedia, breaking news gets put into context — and not in some upside-down format that tells you the very latest development that may or may not affect the larger narrative before it gives you the basics of that narrative so you can understand what that news means.

Along these lines, Wikipedia was the third place I looked for information after hearing about the swine flu outbreak last April; the first blog post I read and stories provided by the New York Times iPhone application proved inadequate.

How should a news wiki be executed? I have my ideas but the only real way to find out is to experiment.

It’s the biggest story of the weekend, no doubt, but there’s a meta-discussion to be had too. I first caught wind of the story late Friday night while waiting for Sean Blanda to pick me up from PHL. Processing through Google Reader, I briefly skimmed Xark!’s “Flu: Don’t panic, but pay attention.” The honest truth, however, is that I didn’t pay attention and it didn’t stick. The next morning as we drove to Temple University for #bcniphilly I was skimming through Google Reader on my iPhone again. This time I came across a post from Vinay Gupta on how you should take action if it becomes a pandemic flu (i.e. what steps you should take to be proactive). His perspective is what perked my interest to learn more.

Although at the top of Vinay’s post was a link to the Wikipedia article in progress, my first intuition was to “confirm” the facts and download the NY Times iPhone application. After three or four minutes, I was able to launch and see their coverage. The only story on the front page of the mobile app, however, was a short article about the outbreak at a school in Queens, New York. Not getting the context I wanted, I went to the Google Mobile app to see what search results it would give me. The top link was the Wikipedia article in progress which gave me the background to the previous three articles and posts.

Notice: only one of the four sources of information I accessed to learn more about a news event (i.e. “pull journalism”) was an established news media brand. I’ll refrain from putting that phrase in metaphorical quotes. This fact, based on a self-observation of news consumption, led me to believe that one of the most important conversations we could have at BCNI Philly would be on the role of the traditional news organization in an ecosystem of news.

Based on a thought-provoking conversation with Ryan Sholin, Eric Ulken, and a few others, I’d like to offer perspective. First, the formats for news need to evolve further. I mean, I went to Wikipedia because I wasn’t satisfied with how the New York Times presented information to me. If they launched a true news wiki with similar or superior accessibility, I think they could steal my attention back for one reason: the New York Time has a brand of accuracy and accountability that is backed by real people. Wikipedia has a brand of accuracy and accountability in my mindspace, but it’s not visibly backed by public faces. Extra points to the Times if they can build a wiki where authoritative figures can suggest edits, and then there’s some way to visualize which contributions came from reporters and which from scientists.

Two, be a curator. I started following @CDCemergency because Tim O’Reilly tweeted about it, not because the New York Times did. In fact, I don’t even follow the Times on Twitter because their profile isn’t any better than an RSS feed. I decide who I follow on Twitter based on whether they create value by curating the web. If I were working at the Times now, I’d create an account like @nytswineflu, which includes both brand and topic, and use it to publish new updates, tease both New York Times articles and others, and answer followers’ questions. Curation is journalism too.

On this topic of #swineflu, there’s another conversation being had about Twitter’s power to misinform:

That aside, the “swine flu” Twitter-scare has once again proved the importance of context – and how badly most Twitter conversations are hurt by the lack of it. The problem with Twitter is that there is very little context you can fit into 140 characters, even less so if all you are doing is watching a stream of messages that mention “swine flu.” Now, the lack of context is probably not a problem in 99% of discussions happening on Twitter – or, at least, it’s not a problem with devastating global consequences.

To me, though, this underscores the need for media literacy and critical thinking skills. Lack of context can be countered by one simple thing: the link. The value of the news organization in this new news ecology is to be a part of the conversation, and provide an easily accessible repository for vetted information, let it be a tweet, an article, or a continuously revised wiki. Reclaim that brand.

A month or so ago, I was hit with the notion that the open-source movement might be applicable to systems beyond software. What I quickly realised, much like when I “invented” the word guesstimate, is that someone had probably already thought of this idea. Undaunted, I began to brainstorm on how I might apply it to an organization I’m working with called Whitman Direct Action, primarily because I feel the concept behind the organization itself is revolutionary and could prove to be a useful model for other colleges and universities to build upon.

For those who are not well-versed in open-source’s history, the philosophy could be argued to have gone pop culture with Linux, a free-to-use and distribute operating system licensed under the GNU Public License. The idea of free software had existed long before Linus Torvald started working on his operating system but, from my uneducated viewpoint, that’s when it began to go mainstream. At present, Linux has become the dominant operating system for many of the internet’s web servers, and a popular distro called Ubuntu is rapidly gaining popularity as a free and open alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary Windows operating system. Unless the trend changes, and again from my viewpoint, open-source architecture will continue moving broadening its marketshare because of the speed at which intellectual property now moves across the internet, as well as the apparent mutual advantages to people who collaborate on open-source projects.

This change in scenery is also apparent with the rapid rise of Wikipedia, a system that encourages adapting and building upon intellectual material. Wikipedia, for those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, is “the free dictionary” where anyone can edit and improve upon its articles. It relies on the collective intelligence of the masses, something normally believed to be inferior to a professional editor. However, a recent study found the Encyclopaedia Britannica had just a small percentage less errors per article than the seven year-old Wikipedia. Considering Wikipedia now has 8.29 million articles in 253 languages compared to the Britannica’s 29 print volumes, it’s no stretch to say the writing is on the wall.

Open-source is a tricky concept to explain to people who have little to no experience with programming. For those beginners, the term “source” refers to the structure of commands which lie behind any digitally created object and “open” implies that the code is free to use and distribute. Take, for instance, the construction of an automobile. Most cars and trucks have, among other things, an engine, a drivetrain, and a way to control the vehicle, sometimes called the wheel, gas pedal, and brake. Those systems are parallel conceptually to code in the digital world because they are the means to an end. They determine the overall output of the product. When you apply open-source to a car or truck, this means that the parts, or information to create the parts, is to be freely used and distributed. If person B wants to improve upon person A’s automobile, they would be free to copy and adapt person A’s orginal designs. Of course, persons C and A could then have access to the adaptations as well. In fact, a system like the one illustrated is beginning to take place in China. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything documents how businessmen in China have opted to open-source the designs of their motorcycles to cut down on the costs associated with developing intellectual property. Working together is now becoming a very smart business decision.

In another example, this piece of writing is being published by the open-source blogging software WordPress, and some of its research has been done on Wikipedia. The list goes on.

Jumping the fence from open-sourcing intellectual property such as code and blueprints to the functional structure of an organization has only recently become possible; thanks for the ability to do this goes to the spreading ubiquity of the internet, and the brilliant tools some companies are building on top of it. An open-source organization is one which seeks to become completely transparent to the public, meaning that any or all of its processes are easily visible and adaptable.

With Whitman Direct Action, or at least initially, we hope to:

• Podcast all and any of our staff meetings or phone calls
• Transform the departamental update emails into blog posts, and encourage interstaff discussion in the form of comments
• Make our financial strategies and budget freely available online
• License applicable content through Creative Commons
• Actively seek feedback from the community on any aspect of our organization, and make that conversation open to anyone

The driving philosophy, of course, is to make our organization “open-source” in the same sense of any software code: free to use, distribute, or modify.