A Camel Is A Horse Created By Folks Using A Wiki

Closing a wiki-centric week (on this blog)

A New Wiki Journalism Experiment at Wired News

Wikipedia - More Wiki Than Ever

Gibt es das / ein Wiki Business Modell?

with a comment of the Wired News Wiki Experiments (sorry, but I didn't have time to follow the process myself) from Rex Hammock on rexblog:

"Watching an article being written wiki-style is like watching sausage being made" ... "there are much better ways to integrate wikis into news writing than to invite a crowd to group-write a single article" as "writing needs a point-of-view and voice and what's that word" ...

He quotes Ryan Singel, who's article was "wikied on":

"Is it a better story than the one that would have emerged after a Wired News editor worked with it? I think not. The edits over the week lack some of the narrative flow that a Wired News piece usually contains. The transitions seem a bit choppy, there are too many mentions of companies, and too much dry explication of how wikis work. It feels more like a primer than a story to me.

That doesn't make the experiment a failure, and we clearly tapped into a community that wants to make news stories better (which, for some, means links to their site).

Hopefully, we'll continue to experiment to find ways to involve that community more.

But I think the experiment shows that, in storytelling, there's still a place for a mediator who knows when to subsume a detail for the sake of the story, and is accustomed to balancing the competing claims and interests of companies and people represented in a story."

from rexblog

Extension:
Ross Mayfield 'Wiki Wired'

Recommended read. A more detailed and differentiated account and useful lessions on the Wiki from Ryan Singel conversation at Wiki Wednesday …

P.S.
So what about the camel created by using a wiki?
"A camel is good for many things", says Rex, "but winning the Kentucky Derby (Remark: or creating a single article) is not one of them."