7 Components: the Function Pages - Developers

The Wiki community initially had to rack their brains over producing
their own news. In contrast to Wikipedia, news cannot be corrected
in a subsequent communication process; it must be of good
quality at the outset. 4 Thus, a type of editing system was introduced
according to which an article must first be confirmed by other users
before it is cleared as 'published'. However, this 'clearance' is not a
technical process: All articles will continue to be accessible to everyone,
except that clearance as published has a status approaching a
quality assessment and provides indications as to the seriousness of a
news item.
The Wikinews concept should be considered an experiment that
just may push the wiki principle to its limits. If and under what circumstances
“citizen journalists” are really capable of tapping the
same or even better sources than the established media remains to be
seen. Critics fear that Wikinews could become a rumor mill, because
effective editing controls are missing. Yet experience with Wikipedia,
which in the beginning was met with suspicion, gives us cause
for hope.
The demonstrative distinction between it and Indymedia, and its
proclaimed self-conception as “citizen's journalism” lead to the suspicion
that the conception was in no way as “neutral” as one might
like to think. Krüger also has his doubts: “Wikipedia is a project of
the Net-educated upper middle class. And Wikinews will also orient
itself with regard to theme, content and language more towards the
typical Zeit than the average Bildzeitung reader. The pretense of
wanting to report about 'what is happening in the world around us'
will likely be reduced to a kind of reporting which reflects only a
class-specific, selective section of current world affairs – but which
is probably very well-founded.” 5
Wikinews will also have to face this problem.
Wikidata
The most technically challenging project is Wikidata. Its goal is to
be able to design and edit data, including structured data, in the wiki
way. We have already struggled with this type of data in the conference
registration process detailed in Section IV of this book. Even
simple tasks, such as displaying an address from a wiki page, require
a great deal of effort and complicated procedure.
4
Patalong announced skepticism on the side of the established media for
2004.
5
Krüger 2004. Regarding the German periodicals mentioned, Zeit is a
respected national weekly newspaper, and Bildzeitung is a national daily
tabloid notorious for its sensationalism.
Problems
Experiments
Database
22.1 Technical Outlook �
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