Hee hee.

That's similar to early sentiments of people about Wikipedia.

But the personal investment required to sit at a computer and edit a wiki page is a lot less than that of going out and tracking down a story.

Hrrrm. I'm not sure how you could motivate people to be independent reporters without giving them an incentive to cheat.

That's similar to early sentiments of people about Wikipedia. Solution:

"It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project. "There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things." Instead, he said, "there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like."

For a first-run experiment of the kind you suggest (but involving major news sources), see Wikipedia's version. It would be an interesting twist to have multiple free-range, volunteer sources and compile data based on that as well -- though the effort would be significant unless that data were specifically provided to the central news-taking site. This sounds like fun, though.

Just brain storming here.

Exclusives wouldn't work. You'd need to have events reported on by multiple people (to give sourcing). Then you'd have to have people voluntarily hashing out the events and editing things, just as with wikipedia.

Hrrrm. I'm not sure how you could motivate people to be independent reporters without giving them an incentive to cheat.

Good thing that our brains are becoming indices rather than depositories of knowledge, huh?

It's useful to have facts as well as an index, obviously. But quotes from dead poets weren't likely to have made the collection even in the pre-Internet days. It's certainly easier for me to find this sort of info now than it was a decade ago.