Crowdsourced articles are impossible to monetize. A person who has contributed to a story is rightfully indignant when some individual or corporation claims copyright over what he freely gave. At the same time identifying his contribution to properly give due credit could be more trouble than it’s worth. An article that pays $100 to a single contributor would give 10 cent to each of 1,000 contributors. The media need to learn about co-operation. Results will vary from one medium to another over the same story, but that’s OK too. The critical thinker will sort it out in his own way, as in Akutagawa’s “In the Grove”.

It’s inevitable that a news story will be chaotic in the hours immediately following its big bang. Some ridiculous pieces of speculation could arise in those first few hours. CNN tried to connect the Sandy Hook shooting with one in Hoboken, NJ, but in time that just quietly dropped from the table.as if it had never happened. It becomes so easy to pretend that this statement was never made; it exists only in the minds of those who happened to be watching CNN at that moment. Nor would it surprise me if someone drew a connection between Sandy Hook and Sandy the Hurricane.

I’ve seen people state that the issues (particularly deletions) are part of Wikipedia “politics” and deleting somehow benefits an editor, but I can’t begin to fathom how. All I know is that I no longer trust Wikipedia any more than I do any generic wiki, and have no interest in editing or contributing to it anymore. Hopefully something else less easily corrupted will take its place.

“3,262 unique users edited one or more of these seven articles, 222 edited two or more of these articles, 60 had edited 3 or more, and a single user WWGB had edited all seven within the first 48 hours of their creation. These editors are at the center of Figure 7 where they connect to many of the articles on the periphery. The stars surrounding each of the articles are the editors who contributed to that article and that article alone (in this corpus). WWGB is an editor who appears to specialize not only in editing articles about current events, but participating in a community of editors engaged in the newswork on Wikipedia. These editors are not the first to respond (as above), but their work involves documenting administrative pages enumerating current events and mediating discussions across disparate current events articles. The ability for these collaborations to unfold as smoothly as they do appears to rest on the ability for Wikipedia editors with newswork experience to either supplant or compliment the work done by amateurs who first arrive on the page.”

http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/12/how-does-wikipedia-deal-with-a-mass-shooting-a-frenzied-start-gives-way-to-a-few-core-editors/