Actually I prefer it to many news formats. If there is a big story (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots ) and you turn on the news or go to the front page of reuters.com in the middle of it they are usually focused on some up-to-the-second minutiae or the latest sub-story to have occurred in the larger story.
This is fine if you have been paying attention to everything up until that point.
This is not so great if you came in a bit late and want an overview of everything about the story.
We handle this problem by creating the page as a news stream, based on each individual news event. We don't have UK riots yet, but here's an equivalent. http://newslines.org/michael-brown/ Unlike Wikipedia's static page-based format, because each news item is discrete, readers can sort the line from oldest news to first, or vice versa. We also use video and other embedded media to tell the story of events, unlike Wikipedia's textbook-like pages.
I actually agree. This is one area in which Wikipedia shines. But when it comes to breaking news, or tracking the actual order of events as they were reported, not so much.
I have of course wondered what it would be like to do Infobitt with a wiki, and I considered setting a wiki up for that purpose. The bottom line is that wikis lack the potential reasons for using the Infobitt format in the first place--making it easier to compete as well as collaborate, making it possible to vote on small pieces of content (as well as the ordering of the content), etc.
In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
