The troops at the Canberra Times are feeling unloved since it was announced that the man they thought would be their next editor, Mick Millett, was going to the ABC instead. Doesn’t anyone want them?
This morning the newsroom was abuzz with a rumour that betrays how nervous they are feeling. It was along the lines that both Amanda Wilson of the Sydney Morning Herald and Rod Quinn of the Newcastle Herald had been offered the job, and had rejected it.
It’s not true, guys. Or not for Amanda, in any case. I rang her this morning. She has just got back from holiday, and says that nobody has sounded her out about anything, let alone offered her the job.
Would she be interested?
“If I were I wouldn’t say. That’s private,” she said.
Quinn, on the other hand, has not returned my calls – again.
One Comment
Here’s a new content topic for you Margaret: Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is proposing a system of ‘Flagged Revisions’. Wales is inviting alternative proposals, he asks these be made within seven days.
‘Flagged Revisions’ will, some Wikipedians argue, prevent vandalism of the site. Under the scheme, edits by first-time or anonymous users will join an approval queue. As opposed to instantly appearing on the site and then being weeded for inaccuracy and bias by automated ‘crawlers’, and observant users, later.
The only problem is that dedicated vandals and spreaders of misinformation can even infiltrate organisations as tightly controlled as the Sydney Morning Herald. So a system of ‘Flagged Revisions’ could falsely validate content by improving user confidence while shutting out genuine contributions from knowledgeable users who spend less time on Wiki.
Users could go away thinking, as they have for decades with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that content must be true if it has been approved. Should users be lulled into believing that content is more reliable just because it has been ‘approved’ by an unknown source?
Wikipedia entries have been created by many, many, unknown contributors and volunteers. ‘Flagged Revisions’ will be approved by one of these characters, or another, and will have, in my opinion, no more validity than they do now. It is hardly as if Wiki content will be approved by known editors who can be held to account, and if that does eventually happen than there is very little to distinguish Wikipedia from any other Encyclopaedia.
Perhaps, Wikipedia could choose proven well edited entries and make a special more Encyclopaedic edition from these instead. Wikipaedia proper could be retained as it is, as a sort of catchment area for articles in development. Instead of clamping down on all content, dedicated users could choose from the overall pool and elevate well researched examples to a more ‘protected’ status (while retaining working copies of these that can still be commonly edited).
This seems to me the sort of thing that would interest Crikey.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/web/wikipedia-may-tighten-editing-rules/2009/01/27/1232818409591.html