Beginning June 1, 2014, Wikipediocracy will launch a $1,000 microgrant program that is intended to fund the news reporting efforts of college journalism students. Qualifying applicants will submit short proposals describing how they would write provocative news stories about Wikipedia, with an emphasis on unexplored and innovative topic areas that have been neglected heretofore by the mainstream news media.

.

In the past 30 days, there have been over 800 news stories that mention “Wikipedia” in the body of the article, and over 150 have mentioned the “Wikimedia Foundation” in the copy. In numerous cases, mainstream journalists (from Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Salon, Fox News, Daily Dot, The Register, and others) have cooperated extensively with Wikipediocracy to inspire or inform their published works about Wikipedia. Obviously, Wikipedia and the governing charity organization that runs its servers are popular fodder for journalists to write about.

But at Wikipediocracy, where we tend to take a more critical view of some of the supposed wonders of crowdsourced “free” knowledge and of the governance practices of the Wikimedia Foundation, we are concerned that today’s field of journalism frequently paints an unrealistically rosy picture of Wikipedia. As one example, we see many journalists complete an interview with Jimmy Wales, republishing word-for-word what his public relations handlers would be pleased to see, without supplying even a single voice in counterpoint that might dispute what Wales professes to be truth.

Wikipediocracy is networking with university professors in Journalism and related fields (e.g., English or Creative Writing), to inform their undergraduate classes of this extra-curricular opportunity to earn $50 per news story, with another chance to win a $300 grand prize, or $100 runner-up prizes, for the “best in class” news articles submitted during the 2014-2015 academic

…continue reading Announcing Wikipediocracy’s Student Microgrant Program