The following comment was made on a post in Cassandra Brown's blog.
Well said! I can see both the positives and negatives to citizen journalism. Axel Bruns (2008) stated in his piece Wonderful Wikis? that a wikis success all depends on "...whether there's an active, diverse, and sufficiently intelligent community of users." There is certainly an active and diverse range of users however intelligence may be lacking in some cases. There has been much discussion on the wiki and whether its information is reliable. I believe it is a fantastic source for a quick reference but as universities believe it is not reliable enough to base a paper on. This is this very reason why people deter from using wikis (the fact that any old person can change and shape an entry) however that is the very reason wikis are wikis! One must remember though that in the case of providing others with information, even experts can be wrong.
As you have said a lack of gatekeeping is one of the negatives that coincides with citizen journalism but it does allow for more viewpoints. I believe collective knowledge and intelligence is definitely better than the opinion of one or two professionals. I also agree that there is a lot of useless information out on the web but I believe that as more and more people collaborate in these communities the worthless information is eventually filtered.
Bruns, A. 2008. Wonderful wikis?. http://snurb.info/node/797 (Accessed May 12, 2008).
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