On Oct. 10, UK daily Trinity Mirror
launched a wiki for the North East of England as a result of an internal contest to solicit innovative ideas. Web developer
Louise Midgley, who works for Trinity's North-East division
NCJmedia, won a cash prize and will also get a future share of any profits from her idea:
wikinortheast.co.uk, "an online archive covering all aspects of the North-East region."
HoldTheFrontPage reports that WikiNorthEast features up to 12 years' worth of digital archives documenting the area's events and people that were not previously being used on NCJmedia's sites. "The ultimate aim of the project is to create an ongoing, up-to-date encyclopedic reference tool for the North East of England, written by people from (or with a connection to) the region."
I've written extensively on wiki journalism and its possibilities, and it's great to see some experimentation in the U.K. However, at this stage there is a small problem: It's very hard to find anything to edit.
For instance, WikiNorthEast features several "topics," such as Kevin Keegan or wind farms. But users cannot edit these topic overviews themselves -- only the "articles" underneath them. To further confuse things, "articles" that are taken from the newspaper archive are not editable. Also, at the moment, those are the only articles I can find on the site.
In other words, there's nothing to edit.
The result is something of a wiki-blog hybrid. The most obvious button, "Add your content to this topic," does allow you to create an article from scratch. (You also can add a topic -- you can only do that from your account page.)
This approach is puzzling. One of the reasons Wikipedia was so successful is that it did not start with nothing -- it took content created in a prior (edited) incarnation, along with copyright-free encyclopedia material. Wikipedia also explicitly invited users to help with incomplete entries ("nubs").
Wiki Northeast might benefit from a similar approach:
- Make archive articles and topics editable.
- Offer incomplete content that needs editing.
In other words: Let go!
...Of course, the biggest challenge is building a community that cares enough about the site to repair the inevitable vandalism. Good luck with that.
