Stop shoveling, start building

Every day, millions of pieces of information stream through the newsrooms of every newspaper in the world.

Some of them land on paper, to be quickly discarded or recycled. Some of them land on websites where they're quickly shoved aside by newer information. Yesterday's information is relegated to poorly searchable archives.

Very little is put to good long-term use.

Newspapers should be the experts on their communities, but the typical newspaper website provides almost no useful background information.

What is the community like? How does the transportation system work? What is the political structure? If I'm visiting, what should I do there? If I'm thinking about moving, what are the neighborhoods like? The schools? Who collects the trash? Where does it go?

Newspapers know the answers, but they're not telling.

Personal utility is one of the major drivers of Internet usage, yet newspapers put almost nothing into building long-life resource pages about basic issues in their own communities. Instead, staff time and energy is almost entirely spent on short-term, short-burn work.

This is an issue of focus and priorities, not of technology. However, technology can provide some help -- and so can the community.

SignOnSanDiego.com has been using wiki technology to enable a community-built (or, more accurately, community-enhanced) guide to bands, bars and various entertainment venues. It's part of the AmplifySD entertainment site, but you can shortcut to the wiki at http://wiki.amplifysd.com/.

Unlike the Los Angeles Times' foolhardy "wikitorial" project, this is a smart way to put the principles of the wiki -- quick, easy collaborative writing and editing -- to work to create a resource of long-term value.

If you're too paranoid to allow the community to help you build such resources, the wiki still can be useful -- just limit edit access to trusted users. Pretty much all wiki software supports journaling and rollback. When someone makes a change, you can tell who made it and what they changed, and you can restore a previous version in case of vandalism (or sloppy fingers).

Wiki software is easy to come by. Wikipedia's software (called MediaWiki) is free, as are many other wiki packages, and several vendors are always eager to provide a commercial solution. Drupal's collaborative "book" content type has many wiki-like characteristics, and there are add-on modules that allow it to match most wiki features.

The Los Angeles meltdown and the Siegenthaler incident gave wikis a black eye in the journalism world. Each illustrates a different mistake. The wikitorial was obviously a bad idea from the outset; wiki success requires that all participants have a common goal, and opinionmongering just doesn't fit that model. The Siegenthaler case is an example of insufficient oversight applied to untrustworthy users. Those are easily avoidable dangers.