Last week I wrote up a review of a Copenhagen story published by four of the world’s prominent newspapers. These articles, written by professional journalists, covered the same story but with different takeaway messages. That got me wondering how citizen journalists would report on these stories.

Because I’m an experienced college student, my first stop was Wikipedia. For years, professors have written off Wikipedia as amateur and unreliable, but my generation continues to turn to it for information ranging from an actor’s height to the range of the spotted salamander. I have come to trust Wikipedia’s information both because changes to articles are strictly edited and submissions are required to cite sources. Surprisingly, some of my professors have come to trust the site as well, and encourage students to create or improve wiki articles for our term projects.

What I stumbled upon this week, however, was a spin-off of Wikipedia: Wikinews, “The free news source you can write!” According to the site, “Everything you read [there] is written by volunteers just like yourself.”

One of the headlines on the home page for October 26 was titled “Hopes for treaty on climate begin to wither.” Like a standard wiki page, the article lists no author, and it is entirely possible that more than one person had a hand in writing the report. The article was well written and covered the main ideas I reported from last week’s article, so I was only slightly surprised to see that the NYT and BBC article were both cited as sources.

Although the content itself was not novel, the delivery was extraordinarily different than that of NYT, BBC, Le Monde, or El País. This short article—only 350 words—contained seven embedded hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles that explained concepts like the ratification process, the Clinton administration, and the Dutch diplomat Yvo De Boer. In a column to the right of the article, Wikinews listed five recent articles on the climate treaty and suggested related Wikipedia articles for further clarification, such as “Climate change,” “Kyoto Protocol,” “Mitigation of global warming,” and “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

After indulging in the links and graphs included in the article, I was somewhat shocked when I remembered that this article was written and edited by one or multiple citizen journalists. At the end of the article, the site encourages the reader to edit, post an opinion, and rate the article for reliability, completeness, and neutrality. Although I decided not to opine, I was comforted by the thought that I could have interacted with this surprisingly reliable environmental news medium.