A few weeks ago, when the death of Terry Schiavo and deathbed vigil for Pope John Paul II dominated headlines, Wayne Saewyc was surprised to see an odd bit of papal news pop up on his computer screen.
On the website Wikinews, which posts stories from a network of volunteer reporters, someone had written that the pope's feeding tube had been removed.
"It was on the main page for many minutes before I caught it," said Saewyc, who goes by the user name "Amgine" on the Wikinews site, which he helps maintain and edit in his spare time.
Upon reading the item, Saewyc quickly deleted it. He said the posting, believed to be the work of an online vandal, was a unique case. Most of the time, editors ferret out false postings before they make it to the live site. But there are exceptions.
Nearly six months into an experiment to apply the collaborative, information-gathering model known as a Wiki to the deadline-driven field of breaking news, operators of Wikinews are finding their mission rife with frustrations and challenges.
The site, an offshoot of Wikipedia, the volunteer-maintained online encyclopedia, is facing pressures its parent organization rarely had to contend with, such as ferreting out fake posts, incorporating original sources and updating coverage to reflect rapidly changing current events.
"In Wikipedia, the writing style of an encyclopedia is more timeless. You can get it right eventually. It's going to be the same article for many years," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder. "With a news story, the actual story has a limited lifespan. If it's not neutral, you've got to fix it quickly."
The Wikinews site follows essentially the same set of rules as the Wikipedia encyclopedia, which allows anyone to create entries or edit and correct other people's work, so long as each change is recorded. Unlike Wikipedia, however, which is solely a reference work, Wikinews reporters are encouraged to submit original stories and photos.
When Wales put his support behind an effort last fall to launch a news site, he said he expected the result to be a far cry from a mainstream journalism operation. So far, he hasn't been proven wrong.
While Wikinews does contain many of the same top stories as more-established news outlets, the open-source site also features articles and photos that don't get top billing elsewhere. Tuesday's lineup, for example, included a story about a discount retailer's plans to open stores in southern Romania along with a piece about the new pope.
Wales said he hopes coverage will be more evenly balanced between regions of the world once more volunteers start contributing to the site.
"We've got five (stories), and two of them are about Romania," Wales said of the site on Monday. "Presumably that's not the norm. It still is following the interests of the participants pretty strongly."
Still, Saewyc noted, the site has on a few occasions scooped mainstream news outlets. Recently, he said, it was first to report about growing unrest in Belize and about a security hole in Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia.
Saewyc was also encouraged by interest levels following the Asian tsunami, when "literally hundreds of people were constantly updating and developing articles."
Bill Mitchell, editor of the journalism website Poynter Online, said the site also appears to have had success in maintaining a neutral tone in its articles. He attributes this largely to the ability for any user to post a correction to a story.
David Speakman, a Wikinews administrator who posts under the username Davodd, says it will take time for the site to live up to its potential as a news outlet for the masses. Over the last few months, Speakman says the news operation has been gaining new participants at a faster rate than other sites operated by Wikipedia. However, he doesn't believe the site is generating enough fresh material yet.
"I don't think we at Wikinews have tapped the full capabilities of collaborative journalism for original reporting," Speakman said in an e-mail. "Many of the writers are new to news, and try to model themselves after what they are familiar with -- newspaper reporting."
Alex Halavais, graduate director for the informatics school at the University of New York at Buffalo, had a similar critique.
"While 'Wikinewsies' may not have direct access to some of the newsmakers, it would be valuable if they more often sought out interviews" and did more original reporting, he wrote in an e-mail.
In particular, Halavais said, he would prefer to see fewer stories that are mere assimilations of content from other news sources, such as the Associated Press.
"If that means interviewing a local priest about (the) pope's death, so be it," he said. "From my perspective, though, after seeing the third quote that is attributed to AP, I'm going to probably click through and read the AP article."
