I heard about the horrific events at Virginia Tech while in the middle of a whirlwind week of work last week. I knew what was going on from snippets of radio, TV and feeds caught here and there. When I finally had a moment to catch up properly I turned instinctively to Google News – but there was too much news to really make sense, order the details. So I turned quickly to Wikipedia – and that’s where everything I needed to know to come up to date was.
My colleague Simon Mustoe carried this video from YouTube on his blog soon afterwards – very similar to the time-lapse images of the July 7th London attacks and a sharp reminder of the efficiency of the Wikipedia model at filtering and ordering information even for live events:
According to the New York Times:
From the contributions of 2,074 editors, at last count, the site created a polished, detailed article on the massacre, with more than 140 separate footnotes, as well as sidebars that profiled the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, and gave a timeline of the attacks.
According to the foundation that runs the various Wikipedias around the world, there were more than 750,000 visits to the main article on the shootings in its first two days, an average of four visits a second. Even The Roanoke Times, which is published near Blacksburg, Va., where the university is located, noted on Thursday that Wikipedia “has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event.”
: : The media coverage of the massacre raised many important issues around reponsible journalism, the public nature of young people’s private lives when victim’s social network pages were used and linked to in coverage and even the use of paid search ads by newspapers to attract traffic to their coverage of the story. Bobbie Johnson and Conor Clarke have an excellent overview of some of these issues in today’s Media Guardian.
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