The discovery of Gliese 581 c is a watershed moment in the search for extrasolar planets and alien life. What folly to view religion as revelation, when it is science that is unwrapping the universe like a giant birthday present, making visible entire worlds one by one, in the unimaginably vast candy store of billions of observable galaxies. One of the most promising missions among the planet hunters is COROT, a space telescope operated by the French and European Space Agencies. And, of course, when I wanted to see what the state of that mission is, I intuitively looked it up on Wikipedia.
Purely by coincidence, COROT has found its first planet yesterday. Not only was this noted in the Wikipedia article about COROT, the planet itself already has an entry of its own. Thus, I did not learn about the discovery through the numerous RSS feeds and news websites I follow (including Wikinews), but through Wikipedia. We call Wikipedia an encyclopedia — but it is clearly much more than any encyclopedia history has ever seen.
I am hardly the first person to notice this, and indeed, the New York Times recently devoted an article to exploring Wikipedia’s coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. How can one make more intelligent use of the news-like characeristics of Wikipedia and combine them in meaningful ways with our news-dedicated project, Wikinews?
I’ve personally subscribed to the history RSS feeds of a number of articles of interest (access them from the “history” page of the article in the bottom left corner). These give you diffs to the latest changes to the article, which can be useful in order to, say, notice that one of your favorite bands has released a new album. But of course you will get a lot of crud, including vandalism and boring maintenance edits. There are simple ways to make feeds smarter — only pushing changes into the feed when an article has stabilized, filtering minor edits, etc.
Structured data will also allow for some interesting feed possibilities: if an album is an object associated with a band, then it is possible to be notified if there are specific changes to the existing objects or additions of new ones. This general principle can be applied wonderfully broadly, turning any wiki into a universal event notification mechanism. (Alert me when person X dies / a conference of type Y happens / an astronomical object with the characteristics A, B, and C is discovered.) Wikipedia (and its structured data repository) will be the single most useful one, but specialized wikis will of course thrive and benefit from the same technology.
In the department of less remote possibilities, I’ve described an RSS extension I’d like to see back in February. It would allow the transformation of portals into mini-news sites linking directly to relevant Wikipedia articles. In general, the more ways we have to publish RSS automatically or semi-automatically, the better–the community will innovate around the technology.
Our separate Wikinews project remains justifiable as a differently styled, more detailed and granular view of events of the day largely irrespective of their historical significance. But I believe we should try to make the two projects interact more neatly when it comes to major events. Cross-wiki content transclusion in combination with the ever-elusive single user login might spur some interesting collaborations, particularly about components that are useful to both projects (timelines, infoboxes, and so on). Perhaps even the idea of shared fair use content is not entirely blasphemous in this context.
The increasing use of Wikipedia as a news source in its own right will only strengthen its cultural significance in ways that we have yet to understand.
May 4, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Regarding RSS feeds for portals, have a look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:News – to comes pretty close to what you want. I wrote it in order to be able to abuse my own wiki as a blog. See http://brightbyte.de/page/PlanetWikimedia for example, although there are no items shown right now: I changed the filter yesterday, old entries no longer match. You can still see them on the planet, and new entries will pop up on my site in the next days.
Syntax sample (hopefully self-exmplanatory):
May 4, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Web gnomes ate the example code. The comment box needs a preview button. Let me try again:
<newsfeed namespaces=”main” categories=”Wikimedia|MediaWiki” nobot=”true” nominor=”true” noanon=”true” unique=”true” trigger=”!feed”/>
That generates the “PlanetWikimedia” feed for use by planet.wikimedia.org
May 6, 2007 at 8:36 am
Indeed, Wikipedia and Wikinews are two different beasts that try to attack the same subject. I learned that when I was trying to edit Wikipedia’s article on Hurricane Katrina as it occured.
The issue here is two-fold:
* Wikinews articles are static, as newspaper articles should be. They describe the events, and in some cases, they draw conclusions. But they are not edited after new information comes to light; they’re historical records by their own right. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is able to reedit its entries to reflect the changing role of an event, as well as document its entire history. Wikinews does not have that privilege.
* Wikipedia is, by far, much more visible than Wikinews. 36% of adults in the U.S. know about Wikipedia and use it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-04-30/Statistical_profiles); I have no idea how many of those know about Wikinews, but it is definitely not 36%. Readers go straight to Wikipedia and bypass the news arm of the Wikimedia sister projects.
How to fix it? I don’t know. But going back to extensions – perhaps DPL2 needs to be installed on Wikipedia, but as far as I know, the only thing that is blocking it is that the extension is a resource hog. RSS feeds can theoretically be filtered (see all of the RC-monitoring bots running on IRC – they share the same source, and are more-or-less accurate in flagging suspicious revisions) and the crud removed from them.