This week’s Economist has an interesting story about a new Jewish lobby that focuses on Israel.  The magazine points out that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has an almost folkloric reputation in Washington D.C., and has been accused of heavily skewing America’s foreign policy interests.

Enter J Street, a lobby group comprised mostly of American Jews who describe themselves as “pro-Israel,  pro-peace”.

Israel’s Likud government is not pleased (although Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni have expressed support), and its ambassador declined to attend J Street’s first annual conference.  In addition to pushing aggressively for a two-state solution with Israel returning to its pre-1967 borders, the Economist–which has followed J Street closely–writes how that is not all that has upset the Israeli lobby’s applecart:

In print and in the blogosphere, in America and Israel, foes have excoriated J Street for having called for an immediate ceasefire during last year’s Gaza war, paying excessive heed to Richard Goldstone’s report accusing Israel of war crimes, making room at its conference for people who do not support the Zionist idea of a Jewish state, and other alleged heresies against the orthodox line of Israel’s traditional supporters in America.

Compared to AIPAC’s $60M annual budget, 275 employees, $130M endowment and new $80M capitol hill headquarters; J Street has an annual budget of $3M and 8 staff (that includes former Senator Lincoln Chafee, one of my favorite politicians).

In my travels to Israel for Wikinews, I met a few connected people, and even before the election my sources were telling me that the new Israeli prime minister would be Benjamin Netanyahu, not Tzipi Livni.  I told Florian Michael just that.  Livni pulled out a couple of votes ahead Netanyahu in the recent election, but it is up to Shimon Peres to now choose the leader of the new government.  My sources are sticking to their guns – it’s going to be Netanyahu.

I had an interesting morning yesterday, as giants from various worlds met in an Upper East Side apartment for breakfast….

Nily Oz and Amos Oz

Salman Rushdie, Israeli President Shimon Peres and David Shankbone

Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and David Shankbone

With Ed Koch

At the New York City meet-up picnic yesterday the subject of Wikinews came up, along with the perennial topic of “What’s wrong with it?”  Absolutely nothing A lot.  One thing that holds that project back is the lack of vision many Wikipedia editors have with their sister project, and that even some Wikinewsies suffer from.

Jon Harald Søby wrote about how great Wikinews is, and I agree.  But there’s a problem:  “Nobody reads Wikinews” said Newyorkbrad at the picnic. I propose the problem is not in lack of readership, but in how the project’s potential has been limited.

When I spoke at the picnic about what I write below, it was met with a favorable response.  In some ways, I think it is the key to the constraints many active content producers feel working on subjects in-depth.

An example of the problem

I think Wikinews has a huge gaping role to fill on Wikipedia, and the projects are more related than people might think. There is a dire need for people to conduct original research with Wikipedia specifically in mind.  I raised at the picnic the case of porn king Michael Lucas’ last name on his article.  There are multiple media sources that say he was given ‘Bregman’ at birth, which was his father’s name.  Lucas disputes this, and furnished his Soviet birth certificate, Soviet passport, and expired American passport to show that he was given his mother’s maiden name, Treivas, at birth.  Lucas wrote and worked with Wikipedia to correct the inaccuracy, which caused an issue on a court case when he was sued as “Bregman”

“They found the name on Wikipedia, so they used it,” Lucas told me about the Plaintiff.

Would you believe that after he supplied three pieces of government-issued identification, good faith editors continued to say we could not use them because they constitute “original research”, which is verboten on Wikipedia?

Logic on Wikipedia does not always run with reason.  Clearly, that shows a problem in how we think on the site in relying too heavily on the letter, and not the spirit, of the policies.

A solution to the problem

But there must be a place in the Wikimedia media world where people can do original research.  Where guidelines are set about what constitutes a “Wikipedia-grade article” so that it can be used on Wikipedia as a source.  There is no reason why the scores of people who have built one of the most influential websites in the world can’t write an article like, “Michael Lucas clears up last name issue”.  I just linked to three pieces of evidence; why should sloppy reporting by the mainstream media take precedence over fact, when our goal is reliability?

Yes, this will expand the Wikinews directive, and there is no time like the present.  It needs it.

Wikipedia editors need a place where they can go and write stories or store information that can be used to clear up problems for which there is a lack of available sources.

Wikinews:  The place for Original Research on Wikipedia

It’s also the place where you can hang out at film festivals (photo, above); have dinner with Augusten Burroughs; discuss life with your favorite band; talk to a sitting head of state like Shimon Peres; discuss the future of drag queens with RuPaul; or mull race relations with Al Sharpton.

It’s also a place where you can follow your local sports team, interview the coaches about plays over which you had a question, take photographs of the players, and probably get to sit with press photographers at games.

Call up your governor, congressmen, mayor or whatever and do an interview about the pressing issues in your community, the ones the press is ignoring.

The undiscovered potential of Wikinews needs to be discovered.  One of its roles should be as a place where Wikipedia goes to conduct research, under guidelines, and voted upon by the community for its acceptability as a source.