However, you bring up interesting points.

I honestly don’t think a news organization necessarily needs to keep a wiki related to news. It’d be too painstaking to maintain and honestly, in the age of Google, it’s kind of limited utility. Unless information in the wiki is unique and somewhat useful, which as I said requires a lot of work, not many people are going to use it.

One thing wiki could be useful in terms of editorial content is keeping things such as Copy manuals online. It would be really cool for example copy editors could access the wiki online while they are copy editing to refer back to it.

You could maybe use a rather public wiki for things such as people and organizations mentioned in the articles. I think CrunchBase from TechCrunch is a good example of that. It keeps track of all the relevant information about the companies and people they cover and it’s easily accessible. That is more of a database than a wiki.

I guess what I’m saying is you need to identify the type of content you will “wikify” or put into a easily accessible database and have guidelines to update it. Otherwise, just having a “wiki’ for the sake of having it may not be very productive.

To clarify on who would have rights to edit the wiki, I think everyone could make contributions if they aren’t anonymous (authentication with Facebook Connect or the school’s email address system). Off the top of my head, new contributors would possible have to have several edits approved before they had the ability to change the live site. Controversial subjects, of course, would be limited to a few key players.

At the moment, I’m just thinking of the text associated with the wiki. I haven’t fully fleshed out how the wiki concept could be applied to lists of related articles, the best tweets, etc., but I’m sure the ethos could apply.