Wikiwonks soak up their guru's grand vision at Hong Kong conference

Journalism is broken - how would you fix it?

That was the question Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales posed to Wikimedians, the online encyclopaedia's armies of volunteers, yesterday.

"This is one of the greatest journalistic opportunities of the century. That we live in an era where possibility to expose wrongdoing is great … these are serious times and we deserve serious journalism," Wales told a packed auditorium at the opening of the 9th annual Wikimania conference in Hong Kong.

"The question is, is it possible to fix this, and what is our role in all of this?"

Wales handed out his e-mail and invited the audience to think about what a publicly funded journalistic enterprise could look like and how it might work. His version was one where professional journalists and community members were on an equal footing, or even where the community was the boss.