A wiki-ed good idea — even if I do say so myself
Are you a well-estabished, global-brand newspaper with extensive archives but a poor system for making them accessible to website visitors? Read on!
Here’s a note I posted to online-news@poynter.org:
On April 3, I filed a note to this list about the nytimes.com redesign.
In it, I kvetched a bit about the topic pages, which I thought were weakly organized (descending chronological order, no explanatory article or timeline or other feature to highlight the most important content, making search the only option) and thus not as useful as they could be.
But you know what might make a topic page sing? Associating it with a wiki, or possibly multiple wikis.
I don’t know if you want to let just anybody participate, lest you repeat what happened with the ill-fated L.A. Times wikitorial.
In the NYT’s case, maybe you restrict it to TimesSelect subscribers, with staff approving entries.
Maybe you provide an incentive, like crediting their account with more free archive searches for each approved wiki posting they make.
There’s a business case for that, I would argue: The vast majority of content on the topic pages is more than seven days old, which means one can only access it by doing an archive search.
The more easy the Times makes it to find that content which is truly valuable, the more those (I suspect profitable) archive pages will be retrieved, and it may well increase demand for TimesSelect memberships at the same time.
A win-win situation, I say! :)
Question: Do you allow Wiki entries to recommend against a certain article, or argue why it’s wrong-headed? I say sure, why not. Since the NYT would be operating the wiki, I’m sure it would allow itself the right of fair response. :)
To me, this approach would be a logical way to harness the collective intelligence of one’s audience and make one’s product better at the same time.
Let me know what you think.
If anyone runs with this, buy me a beer sometime. :)
Bill Doskoch
Toronto, ONhttp://billdoskoch.blogware.com
PS: The NYT Co. owns About.com, an info-guide company. Any potential for synergies there?
Bill, I'm not a fan of wikis, or most sorts of information systems run by non-professionals for that matter. There are reasons why people get library science degrees, and why there are standards for organizing information for easy access.
Look at the “help” resources for Firefox or Thunderbird, arguably two of the most popular Open Source applications, and you'll see hundreds or thousands of pages, spread over a dozen or more websites, with no obvious organization or even linking between like resources.
Ordinary readers (or geeks) just don't know how to do this kind of work, so you wind up not with a sensible and consistent interface, but with a rather skewed top ten list that makes lesser topics almost impossible to find.
Barry, all I know is that right now, all the NYT does with its topics page is put stories in chronological order. If you don't know about the battle of Tora Bora, as one example, there's nothing to tell you that it was a critical one in terms of the War on Terror.
If you're doing a wiki for the NYT topics pages, my vision would see it as some type of pro-am effort.
While wikipedia might not be perfect, on several topics, I've found it good enough to at least get me started.