Wiki Power
In the hours after a series of explosions rocked an oil storage facility north or London this morning, the place to turn for the most comprehensive coverage of the incident was not CNN, not NYTimes.com, not even the venerable Times of London.

It was Wikinews, a free news source written by hundreds of volunteers from around the globe.

Wikinews carried the first news of the explosions at 6:21 a.m. GMT, about 20 minutes after the incident occurred. In the eight hours following the blasts, the website's account was updated more than 150 times by more than 15 contributors, most from the U.K. By 2 p.m. GMT, the site had posted detailed information about the intensity of the explosions, their location, injury reports, likely causes and contact information for people who were affected.

Equally significant, the site linked to eight stories from other news sources, several photos of the explosion and more than 20 other sources of information on the region, the British petroleum industry and oil pipelines.

Wikinews is a new project by Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to supporting the dissemination of free information, principally through Wikis. The group is essentially replicating the reference section of a library through community publishing. It has about 10 reference projects in the works.

As a news wonk, I'm fascinated by Wikinews and what it does and doesn't do better than traditional media. Comparing the Wikinews account to others by CNN and the Associated Press, I was struck by Wikinews' focus on report the facts of the incident rather than providing context. For example, both the Times and CNN noted near the top of their stories that Great Britain has been on alert for terrorist attacks since the recent subway bombings in London while Wikinews made no mention of terrorism fears at all. The mainstream news organization also took pains to quote eyewitnesses and government and industry officials in their stories. Wikinews provided no such information, although it's fair to say that many of the contributors to Wikinews were eyewitnesses themselves. In general, I thought the mainstream media did a better job on reporting the context and the human tragedy of the event while Wikinews was more effective at reporting the facts and linking to other sources of information.

A lot of the discussion around Wikinews has focused on whether community journalism could come to replace traditional media. At this point, it appears that both have their place. Wikinews "reporters" don't have access to the official information channels that the mainstream media do. Community journalism also doesn't lend itself to contextual reporting because there's no professional editor overseeing the coverage. There is value to having that one person at the top who can package and prioritize information coming in from multiple sources.

However, Wikinews did an outstanding job in this case of serving as a nexis point for coverage of the event. No other coverage that I saw even came close to linking to the variety of information sources that could fill out a reader's understanding of the story. This is where community journalism excels. It is news as a collection of facts, supplemented by exhaustive references. In many ways, it's the essence of journalism as the "first draft of history."

Dan Gillmor, by the way, has done a lot of thinking about this topic as he works to launch a company around the citizen journalism idea. You can read about it on his blog.  ¶ 9:32 AM