The shortcomings of algorithmic news aggregation like Google News are well-known (and often comic). But as I sort of alluded to in my post on RSS last night, I’ve been hoping for a while for some sort of news source that 1) aggregates— and ideally interprets— duplicate sources of the same story and 2) gives background to the story.

News stories suffer from the fact that each 5 paragraph story tends to contain 1-2 background paragraphs which assume you know nothing whatsoever about the issue, and 3-4 more assuming you know exactly how this most recent update advances the progressing story. Well, if you haven’t been following a story, it’s almost possible to follow what the update means, and how it fits into the overly general background in the story.

Well, the Wikimedia Foundation comes to the rescue.

[via Slashdot]

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 4th, 2004 at 11:01 am and is filed under geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.