This issue highlights a structural flaw in Wikipedia's software, where the "encyclopedia" is being used for a purpose it was not designed for: Wikipedia is not a newspaper. These articles about dead children are news archives and not encyclopedic. An encyclopedia by definition requires fact checking. News archives do not require checking (or at the least the checking can be done external to the archive).

I am the founder of Newslines. We are the closest thing to a Wikipedia for news, although we are really a mix of daily news, Wikipedia and YouTube. Our writers create news-based timelines on any person, product or news event.

There are many problems with the way Wikipedia deals with news (see my article Wikipedia's 13 Deadly Sins. On the reader side, news pages are text-based, very unstructured, and don't have embedded videos and cannot be sorted or filtered. On the writers' side there are many problems with the 10-year-old wiki software that create unnecessary conflict and trouble for anyone trying to add data. By using a simpler approval process we have very few edit wars, happier writers, and a better reader experience. Also, our model makes it much more difficult for groups of readers to push their point of view.

Since we launched in May, our writers have added over 25,000 news events, on thousands of topics. Unlike other work-for-free-while-we-make-billions sites, we paid our writers $1 per post for those posts. In the next few weeks we are moving to a revenue share, where writers and editors can get paid for their efforts. Some of our writers have already made thousands of dollars and we hope they will make much more with the new system.

Some examples: Google Glass, Ben Affleck, Michael Brown, Paul Graham

Sorry I've meant table of contents. On your site, I can't get a simple list of the new's items headlines.

That feature is on the list. Should be ready in a few weeks.

Yet on your google glass page you include a commercial and don't even try to declare it as this.

It's a news item, but I can understand the confusion. It's similar to adding an ad for a new MacBook release on the apple page. It's news and an ad.

Thanks for your comments. Definitely a few things to think about.

Maybe you are right that the web is not the place for illiterates, but I know from my kids who primarily use tablets and mobile they are not interested in textual media. They are the web users of the future. As I say in the article, why try and read 3000 words about Taylor Swift when watching a few videos will give you far more information?

"sin" 4 is tackled by wikidata, but unfortunately they are still in a very early phase.

I wonder what the incentive is for writers to do this work. I can understand people writing a page to get some glory, but there's not much glory in adding tabular data.

Content is created through controversies. First you say that in wikipedia there are so many conflicts, and then you say that Wikipedia is like a socialist dictature.

I said it has all the inefficiencies of socialist structures, resulting in a low-quality product. That you can download Wikipedia to your HDD is not the measure of a project's advancement. Also, it doesn't matter if the information is "free" if it is inferior. Most media in the word is actually for-profit.

You don't even make an index [newslines.org], and separate your content into "pages". wasn't paper the thing you regarded as "outdated"?

I don't know what you mean about an index. You can see our popular pages on our front page, and search for anyone else using the search bar. By adhering slavishly to a book-like metaphor, the information on Wikipedia articles is overly textual, and cannot be sorted or filtered. The user has no control over the page. The point is that the web gives us many more ways to display data that thinking about it as though it were a book.

And fanpages are already tackled by wikia. You are more a competitor for those, not for wikipedia.

Newslines is not like Wikia at all. We crowdsource news timelines on people, products and news events. Some examples: Amber Vinson (Ebola Victim), Google Glass, Virgin Galactic. None of these can be considered fanpages.

By giving editors money for writing content, you create a system in which lots of people write tons of bullshit, and your page gets more and more meaningless content that can never be updated.

Every post on our site goes through an approval process, so vandalism and other content issues are far less than those on Wikipedia. We also building systems to pay people to maintain the site, unlike Wikipedia pages, which after and initial burst of activity are left to wilt [insert thousands of examples here].

For those interested, I made a timeline of Ron Klain's life.

Thomas Eric Duncan has died of Ebola

But for Wikipedia to actually become a platform fully embraced by women, it would have to change its culture in fundamental ways, reducing its emphasis on anonymity and providing more opportunities for meaningful companionship and satisfying social relationships between its contributors. Failing that, women will simply continue to vote with their feet, and find their enjoyment and altruistic fulfilment elsewhere.

Most of the reasons for the lack of female participation in Wikipedia, including those above, are false. On Newslines, my crowdsourced content site that aims to replace Wikipedia's biographies and news-based events, 80% of our contributors are women and minorities. See our leaderboard

Wikipedia can never work for minorities and women because its software and policies are specifically designed to exclude them. The reason we get more women posting is because Newslines is created specifically to allow users to add content without the conflicts that are inherent in a wiki-based system. Wikis are built through conflict. Wikipedia's conflict-driven software and policies attract ego-driven white males eager to gain power through the display of their knowledge. The intensity of this conflict excludes other groups.

I go further into this in this post, but the gist of it is that 1) we pay our writers to contribute 2) we have system that allows people to add information with no conflict -- so far over 11,000 posts with no trouble 3) posts are assessed on the quality of the post, not on who made them -- no conflicts of interest or harassment possible 4) and we don't allow editors ownership of the page -- denying powerful groups the ability to censor people and text.

The real crime though, is to blame the people who are excluded for the failings of the system. How many times do we have to hear -- by the people who created the system that excludes them -- that women and minorities are not interested, they don't have enough time, they don't know enough, they can't use the interface, they prefer fluffy stuff, and that they are are lazy? It's time to move past these old arguments and see Wikipedia's dysfunction for what it is - a software, policy and leadership failure.

I made this news timeline of Swartz a while back. If you see anything missing drop me a note.

Confused? Feel free to check out my Mt Gox timeline

FALSE: Any other editor who sees you editing your own article will slap you with a ban for COI. It's a standard part of wikilawyering.

I interviewed Mark Karpeles in May 2013. The first thing I did after I left the meeting was tell my friend, a guy who has worked for big banks all his life, that he should apply for a job at Mt Gox because it was very obvious they had no oversight whatsoever and needed someone like him to make sure they complied with basic financial software standards.

For those who need an overview of the rise and fall of Mt Gox, I made a handy timeline