It doesn’t get a lot of attention from media analysts during discussions about breaking news events like the recent shootings in Connecticut, but one of the first places I go whenever that kind of incident occurs is Wikipedia — and I’m usually amazed at how quickly and thoroughly a page about the event is created, updated and edited by unseen and often anonymous editors. Now a social-sciences researcher who specializes in studying Wikipedia as an information source has analyzed this phenomenon, with specific attention to mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook, and given us a fascinating look inside one of the few crowdsourced online news efforts that occurs at that kind of scale.
The best line in this piece: “Some articles are edited hundreds of times an hour”