Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-06-13/In the news

'Wikitorials' to appear at the LA Times

The

Wikitorials, inspired by Wikipedia, will initially involve selected editorials, and the newspaper's staff suspect the results may be unpredictable. Editorial page editor Andrés Martinez said "We don't know how this is going to turn out. It's all about finding new ways to allow readers to interact with us in the age of the Web". One former bureau chief of the paper described the idea as "absolutely crazy" [2].

The details of how wikitorials will work have yet to be described in detail, and commentators speculated that the paper would have trouble preventing

The article quoted figures of 5 million visitors a month to the project, and noted that the current total of about 1.5 million articles in 200 languages far exceeds Encyclopædia Britannica's total of 120,000. Business Week described the quality of Wikipedia's volunteer-produced content as "surprisingly high". Wikimedia Foundation president Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative", but a Britannica spokesman claimed that the sheer volume of Wikipedia articles may be too much information for most readers, and said nothing about quality.

Wikipedia to save the world

The threat of a pandemic has been much in the news recently, with the scare of the SARS virus in 2003 being followed by ongoing concerns that avian influenza, which has devastated chicken stocks in Southeast Asia, might mutate into a form easily transmitted between humans.

Having noted the wide readership of Wikipedia's article on the