The blogosphere is teeming today with items about where you can send your contributions to aid in humanitarian and relief efforts in the wake of the strongest earthquake in 40 years and the resulting tsunami. Keeping track of each of these blogs would be dicey at best, even with the massive amount of trackbacking and cross-linking that’s going on.

It’s a situation that puts the strengths of a wiki on display. Rather than thousands of independent posts that characterize coverage in the blogosphere, a wiki makes it easy for many people to contribute information, aggregating it in one place. That’s precisely what’s going on over at WikiNews, the new citizen-journalism effort from the folks who brought you Wikipedia. The news coverage of the quake and tsunami includes a section on “The post-tsunami humanitarian situation.” The items listed here grow hourly as more contributors add what they know to the page.

Legitimate concerns about the validity of citizen journalism remain, but this is one example of how it can easily outshine traditional journalism.