Teen news editor

His screenname is Gracenotes and, “after his homework is done,” he works on cleaning up breaking news stories on Wikipedia for six hours at a shot, the New York Times reports. We all know how popular Wikipedia has become as a source for term-paper research (the Times article takes you behind the scenes at Wikipedia so you can see how viable this actually is, as long as other sources are in the mix). Wikipedia has also become a very viable news source, the Times article illustrates. It’s like compressed real-time news, a blend of encyclopedic summarizing that keeps up with news as it breaks. Its writers’ sources are usually the wire services (e.g., AP and Reuters) in Yahoo and Google News, and the difference is a “constantly rewritten, constantly updated” summary of a breaking story (as in Wikipedia) vs. “a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments” (as with conventional news on paper and the Web). Gracenotes and his fellow editors expand and correct a one-liner “stub” (almost like a headline) that someone posts about a breaking story (such as the Virginia Tech shootings). They almost compete for the greatest accuracy and “N.P.O.V.” (“’neutral point of view,’ one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars,” the Times reports. Note this comment at the article’s end, something very impressive to a baby-boomer journalist: “The Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding [the current culture of proud] subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.”