[Home]ArchivingNews

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories
I tried using MeatballWiki to archive news on the online front for a while. After revisting pages a couple months later, the news was meaningless. News has temporal context that disappears in the WikiNow. -- SunirShah

As a matter of clarification all wiki postings have temporal context. Discussions about events from last year, old software releases, books, movies, etc. may no longer be relevant. They are "news" items in the guise of something more than news. --TomLeylan?

I'd be really keen on finding a good way to archive news on a wiki, a medium with few temporal cues. A discussion and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. -- SunirShah

See also TimeStream, Wiki:BreakingNews.

Editable pages are perhaps not ideal for an archive. If regarded as acceptable, they still need to kept in check, ie., not Wiki:TooBigToEdit, not vandalized, etc.

If each archived news page had a name making the content obvious, people would not read it 'accidentally'. Some wiki site providers might be disappointed at such use of their storage space, however. -- AnonymousDonor

[n.b. Your question was raised on a site where mere 'off-topic' pages have a page to list them (Wiki:WriteNewPages). I don't get it. That's a page where orphaned pages can be spawned. How does that promote off-topic discussion? It doesn't, but it allows a new topic to be introduced with less distraction for those who prefer fewer topics.]

Well, we can presume the afforded security on the wiki is sufficient given that we are already participating on it. I don't think that making a separate page for each article would be best. I think it would be better to put a bunch of stories related to one topic all on one page on that topic. For instance, see KuroShin for news about that.

But then again, maybe not. I have always thought about having a news system where only the latest developments were entered, instead of all those background paragraphs usually presented (used to provide context to those who haven't been following the story and for future historians). Then, you can make a link from the latest event to the preceeding events that were salient. For instance,

Endeavour detached from the International Space Station today at 1407h UTC and is making its way towards the earth. It plans to land in 25 hours at Cape Canaveral. See previous events in this story.

Stories are, after all, a continuum of events. Often, the events aren't linear either. The hypermedium here provides an opportunity to follow event threads through time even if they fork or merge. Also, expanding on concepts and detail is easier with hyperlinks. Just click to gain more information along that axis, for instance what Endeavour is.

But that wouldn't be useful on a concept wiki like this or WikiWiki. Instead, a separate wiki would be necessary. That would be interesting to try, I think. Consider that retractions would be "front page news" as they would be on RecentChanges. -- SunirShah

Some Wikis - and arguably this wiki - are more social chat venues then creators of lasting value. Adding News to such a wiki could provide a focus to conversations and it wouldn't matter if the currency lapsed.

This wiki, at least, is both atemporal and temporal. Consider SoftSecurity vs. PervasiveComputing. I really think that's a good balance. See DaveHarris's comments on BarnRaising.

Actually archiving news on a wiki has interesting challenges - and some equally interesting strengths. Links to original stories and outside research can provide people with strong facts. The wiki nature of a page allows for in-text annotation, with WikiNames pointing to supporting discussion. Yes, it's possible for the original stories to get changed.

Is this bad, given that anyone reading this should know of that possibility? I know historians (and curious people like myself) would probably love to see what is effectively a timeline of notable events selected by the community - with commentary by the community.

A SlashDot like NewsWiki that hosted continuous new stories (RecentNews??) and discussion of them could produce such a thing. Some heavy editting several years later could turn it into an interesting tome of historical information. And I like the wiki ThreadMode much better than SlashDot (though it doesn't scale as well).

Eventually, I hope to see something like a NewsWiki. I hope CrystalPalace moves somewhere forward in that direction. -- SunirShah

The below is redundant in part with DatePage, although I am not wise enough to unify the two. Perhaps some enterprising editor will see the light.

What about adding article id's or somesuch to the link pattern? Here's a scheme for a possible WikiLog:

I'm not sure how we would address the comment tree from the wiki perspective. I'm sure there are better ideas, but a random stab would be:

2001.01.16.NebraskaHurricane.0.1.4.3 as the fourth reply to comment 0.1.4.

Or we could allow individuals to title their comments instead of (or in addition to) the automatic numbering. That could get messy if the hierarchy gets deep. We might address an entire comment subtree as 0.1.4.*. And any page that has a comment tree (such as 2001.01.16.NebraskaHurricane, or even StanfordPrisonExperiment) might automatically display the comments below or beside the page text. Again, just an idea. I'm sure someone else can improve on this.

We might even extend the naming scheme for ViewPoint's purposes. In a sense, we'd almost create a sub-wiki a la TWiki:

2001.01.16.Reuters.NebraskaHurricane
2001.01.16.AspiringReporter.WorstHurricaneToHitNebraskaInHistory

or perhaps instead:

ReutersWire.2001.01.16.NebraskaHurricane

Different point-of-entry pages would have different embedded macros to generate summaries of the day's news, or the week's opinion articles, etc.

At this point these are just vague thoughts placed in the open for criticism. But I'm excited at the possibility that it might integrate the ideas of WikiLog and ViewPoint. -- anon.

This is a really good idea. How about something like SubPage""s? So, NebraskaHurricane?/2001/01/16? Then you could go to a page called NebraskaHurricane? and talk about it generically there, like hurricane patterns, how it's affected people; but you could drill down for news events by pushing further.

H'm. For those of the WikiCulture mindset, that's probably the preferred ordering. Those more interested in a time-based view (whether as historians or as followers of current events) would probably rather see 2001/01/16/NebraskaHurricane?. So we either need manual cross-indexing, multi-rooted nodes, or multidimensional data. -- anon.

You can split the LinkPattern into two halves. Subject and date. Then you can make the LinkPattern Subject/Date | Date/Subject. Or you could make a choice which you prefer to emphasize and go in that direction.

I think you got the right idea by putting the major part of the date first. That way you can get all the news for 2001, all the news for January 2001, all the news for January 16, 2001.

More relevantly for us, we can go to KuroShin to get generic discussion of kuro5hin, and then drill down for particular news articles archived here.

Even better, this allows the idea of the TimeStream idea. Instead of restating context, one can just link to it. Very nifty... very nifty. -- SunirShah

Thanks. :-) I'm thinking about a fresh implementation that subsumes ViewPoint, ArchivingNews, WikiLog, and maybe even KeptPages all into some hierarchichal scheme (why don't we throw in PersonalCategories while we're at it? :-). Need to think more about how all that fits together... -- anon.

I changed my mind. In a narrative, there are two components, subject and predicate. In fact, this basic concept appears in every language on earth and is highly suspected to be hard wired in the brain. In the context of journalism (or chronicling), there are still subjects and events. Things happen to, because of people, places, companies, more things.

A properly woven graph structure would then have two components. Subjects and events. An event may (most likely) involve many subjects (John married Mary), and a subject may (most likely) be involved in many events (Mary was also elected Mayor).

Moreover, the events follow a directed acyclic graph through time in a cause-event chain. Or at least they are related to each other.

Further more, the subjects have relationships between each other. (And tracking this, through time, is the main point of CrystalPalace. You can see why I'm interested in this.)

Each way, the point is that the system must have two independent types of pages. One temporal, the other atemporal. Thus, articles about KuroShin can also involve VA/Linux without having to duplicate the same article under VA/Linux. -- SunirShah

Discussion

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories
Edit text of this page | View other revisions
Search: