Now I get it. This site is built on the open source content management system Drupal. Let's go with what we've got to meet an announced 2-3 month deadline for Wired's crowdsourcing feature: what out-of-the-box functionality in Drupal is available to enable what is desired for articles in various stages of workflow: perhaps one set of functions for reporters, another for for researchers (nobody wants to be called a "fact checker"), another for copy editors, another for story editors?
A picture would be worth a thousand words here: I want to see the workflow. I also want a clearer picture of organizational hierarchy than what I see on masthead: functional descripions would help.
Like playing tennis without a net, free form content creation and idea generation has its limits. Real world constraints of a 2-month deadline and a specific content management system should be embraced now so we may move on to substantive work and away from meta work that, however fascinating, just won't matter when the deadline has passed.
The site was built on open-source collaboration software Drupal and the code has been freely licensed under GNU General Public License.
When the project concludes in two to three months, we hope to have produced the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing ...
SOURCE: Wired Meets Assignment Zero, By Wired staff 10:00 AM Mar, 14, 2007
(FWIW, I would have chosen not Drupal, mature as it is, but Django for a news content management system. I'll be taking what I learn here and comparing it to solutions already available on, or easily added to, that well-designed -- and newspaper developed and tested -- framework. Who wants to code in PHP when they can write practically executable pseudocode in Python? When it's time to move on from this experiment in doing Wired's work and writing David's masters in journalism thesis ;>, let's move there: even non-coders can benefit from working on a content management platform written in a language that appeals to what some consider better developers. For one, the lead developer of Django really gets the potential of news markup.)
