When wikis won't work I couldn't help but be intrigued by this draft posting on wikinews.org about a diner in a Buffalo restaurant who allegedly found a rubber glove in his sandwich. Yuck. The story interested me for reasons other than the weirdness of it, though.

For one thing, the draft has no names. Neither the customer nor the store manager is identified. There is also a nonsequitir at the end of the second paragraph referring to the restaurant's efforts to expand and tear down an old house in the process. I couldn't understand what this information had to do with an unpleasant dining experience.

Standard journalistic practice is to seek comment from both sides, so I called Pano's Restaurant and spoke to owner Pano Georgiadis. He was unaware of the Wikinews posting and vigorously denied that this incident had happened. He called it "fiction."

I wanted to contact the author to get his or her side of the story but the author is merely an IP address at Adelphia Communications, so that was a dead end. Adelphia does serve the Buffalo area.

I looked a little more into the reference to the restaurant's plan to demolish an old house as part of an expansion effort. There's a website about the house that explains some of its history and mentions Pano's expansion plans. It looks to me like this is a pretty contentious issue in that neighborhood.

So put two and two together and it starts to look like this "news story" may have been the work of a disgruntled neighbor who's pissed off at Pano's. That's just speculation, of course, but there's no way to find out since the author can't be reached. Anyone could have made the story "news," though, by simply changing a tag. Then it would have shown up on Wikinews's front page, right up there with the Saddam Hussein trial.

It's also interesting to noted that this story had been reviewed by other people. There had been 15 edits by four other people, who dutifully rewrote it, polished it and corrected grammar errors but never bothered to check its accuracy. Community journalism, in this case, was really community copy-editing.

The more I look at the Wikinews model, the less I like it as a mainstream information source. When it's good, it's very good, as I noted in an earlier analysis. I think it could be a great adjunct to existing news media - and some newspapers are experimenting with this - but the potential for damage through abuse or just plain ignorance is too high. There are certain journalistic disciplines that have to be enforced or the process just doesn't work.

BTW, I checked the LA Times, which launched a wiki in June, to see how it was coming along. It's been shut down "because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material," a notice says.

The dark side of community journalism.  ¶ 9:01 AM