OJR introduces new wikis on journalism

Editor's Note: Today, OJR launches a new feature, designed to help "grassroots" journalists, bloggers, students and other Web publishers without formal journalism training to write more accurate and informative content.

We start with three tutorials, intended to help a beginner write and report clearly, accurately and ethically. But these are not static lessons. Instead, we present them as wikis, articles that any OJR registered user can add to or edit. Each article also includes a discussion area, where readers can submit questions for other OJR readers to answer.

These first drafts are simple, and will seem obvious to experienced journalists. Our hope is that each article will evolve as OJR readers add examples derived from their wisdom and experience. Some of what we present, especially our article on ethics, is destined to elicit controversy. By offering these lessons as wikis, with discussion areas attached, we hope to provide a forum for our readers to discover some consensus about these skills, from which we can all engage in thoughtful debate.

But we do not wish for these articles to evolve into PhD-level discussions about journalism. We want them to remain practical advice, accessible to anyone who writes online, especially those who never went to j-school.

This feature represents an experiment for OJR, as well. My goal is to transform OJR into the "test kitchen" for the online publishing industry. Few traditional news websites have experimented with wikis. So we will. Together, we will find how our community of readers responds. Then, from time to time, I'll report on our progress, either on these pages or at industry conferences.

We are also presenting these articles under a Creative Commons license, another first for OJR. Our writers have written on Creative Commons before, and I think that it is important that we illustrate, as well as report, many of the innovations challenging online journalists.