The journalists who complain about Wikipedia’s lack of accountability will love the fact that the founders of the collaborative encyclopedia are introducing a wiki to allow anybody to report news. Currently in beta, Wikinews works just like Wikipedia, except (as co-founder Jimmy Wales notes) authors will need to create original content instead of summarizing existing material.

Wikinews was inevitable. Back around 1995, I was on a panel that included the president of Canada Newswire. I spoke for a few minutes about selective news reading, the fact that the Net makes it easy for readers to assemble their own newspaper (what Nicholas Negroponte called The Daily Me, bypassing the judgments of editors who decide for readers what’s important. The newswire president was horrified. “You need trained journalists to identify what’s important based on their experience,” he insisted. “Without that, you could miss something you really should be paying attention to.”

I agreed with him wholeheartedly, but followed up by asking, “So what are you going to do about it?” The plain answer is: nothing. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it. The same is true of Wikinews. If you read my post about an essay by the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, you know that, for all its strengths, there are still plenty of issues associated with content produced by the untrained masses. The same goes for news reporting. Scoff all you like at the failings of professional journalists, but if you think they make mistakes, just wait until Joe Beercan starts reporting the news.

Will the massive peer review that is Wikipedia’s hallmark solve the problem? It doesn’t on Wikipedia, where not only aren’t the standards of encyclopedia entries met—they’re not even known. This doesn’t keep the Wikipedia from serving as a useful tool; I use it all the time. But it’s not 100% authoritative, and I never trust what I read there unless I can verify it somewhere else. How many people will read Wikinews and make it their sole news source? The idea is just a bit alarming.

You may argue that blogs are already doing this, that Wikinews simply uses a different tool to let readers become contributors. True, but you can’t pull every blog reporting the news onto your desktop by clicking one bookmark.

I’m not suggesting there are no benefits possible from the Wikinews experiment. For one thing, we’ll see news reported that the mainstream media ignores. Broader coverage of more news can only be good. For another, the mainstream media will be forced to address issues they might otherwise choose to ignore once a story breaks on Wikinews. We already have plenty of experience of this phenomenon in the blogosphere.

In any case, it’ll be interesting to watch.