The second hypothesis reflects our assumption that most users do not use Wikinews to report about events they personally experienced, but to spread news they discovered in other sources. This is especially interesting considering that, according to Jimmy Wales, president of Wikimedia, Wikinews “aims to include more original reporting” [Wei05], which we believe was not achieved yet. However, our procedure can be used for monitoring future progress in this matter.

Our first approach to test the hypothesis was to use TeCFlow’s Dynamic View as follows: The basic idea was that, if our hypothesis was incorrect, in Dataset2 there should be star-like structures, since for each article there are links between its creator and all its editors. The creator of each article should be in the center of such a star structure. Therefore, it should be possible to distinguish between editors and creators of articles. If, on the other hand, our hypothesis is correct, editors are linked to various actors and the single star-structures will overlap so that the overall network will have a very democratic structure.

We conducted both analyses using TeCFlow’s Dynamic View with a time window of 50 days in order to avoid too much overlapping simply due to the large timeframe (as we observed it in the Static View). As expected, no star-structures could be identified (Figure 2). Links between editors showed that most users edit on a variety of topics.

In order to verify this result, we conducted another analysis, this time not looking into connections between users, but between categories of articles. In order to do this, we used TeCFlow’s Term View Function, using categories as input for the term analysis. If our hypothesis was correct, there should be no dense clusters of categories in the graph.

The results of this second analysis confirmed the outcome of the first. There was no indication for the existence of separate interest networks.

Therefore, we summarize: Users who contribute to Wikinews regularly are not confined to only a few categories, but write on a variety of topics. This also confutes the assumption that Wikinews is used to spread first-hand knowledge about current events. On the contrary, most articles are written based on quotes from other sources, i.e. news agencies like Reuters. Therefore, Wikinews has failed to achieve its goal until now.

Figure 2