In April 2004, the flourishing political site DailyKos opened wiki-feature called dKosopedia, inviting readers to contribute political articles to this community-guided archive. Since then, over 6,000 articles have been added, including threads about the 2006 election, Hurricane Katrina, and the Iranian nuclear debate.
When Stephen DarkSyde and a few DailyKos writers published a collection of science essays called Kosmos: You Are Here, they made extensive use of Wikipedia, a step into the future of writing. As online publishing pushes individual writers to the breaking point, creative communities will encourage more user-generated content.
We talk wiki in the conclusion of my DarkSyde interview, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
Your project made use of Wikipedia hyper-links for crucial definitions and context. Were you happy with the quality of these complex science Wikipedia links? What do you say to the Wikipedia critics who say that this encyclopedia is a bad reference tool?
Stephen DarkSyde:
I used the Wikipedia because it is free use, and it's more permanent than a randomly found website. I think the information quality there is excellent. Anyone can use it, just like they use a dictionary or a thesaurus. It can be a research tool and direct source for text.
I have no idea who the critics are, the few folks I've personally seen complain about the wiki haven't produced much in the way of blog posts that I'm aware of.
So I don't know really know why people would gripe about it.
On a big juicy target like Daily Kos, you better assume that any image you don't think is free to use is owned by Tom DeLay and Bill Gates. And they'd love to drag a big blog like that into court just to give us a legal black eye.
» Five Easy Questions: Michael McColly, Part One from ThePublishingSpot
"The result is a revelation," wrote New Yorker journalist William Finnegan after reading The After Death Room, Michael McColly's memoir about his life as an AIDS activist and yoga instructor. "An epic twenty-first-century canvas on which... [Read More]
Tracked on: May 23, 2006 8:27 AM | Permalink to Trackback