It's not so much why do we follow something as it breaks - that's normal human curiosity/pattern hunger. But my question is how many people will do it consistently enough to be neutral, rather than because they're selectively interested in (but not necessarily informed about) a small set of stories. As I understand it this has been the problem for Wikinews - it can't function as well as Wikipedia because the number of people is below a critical threshold, so it lags breaking news by up to several days.
That's an excellent question. Wikinews doesn't function as well, in my opinion, because Wikinews feels like work - the people I've talked to that use/create Wikinews say they do it out of a sense of civic responsibility; it's not enjoyable, and a lot of the time they say it feels like rewriting the New York Times (from the couple dozen I've talked to).
The solution, I think, is in making following the news as it breaks exciting/interesting enough the average person would contribute. Our solution for that was to show you all of the social media streaming from different sources streaming in real time related to the event, making it more like /r/new (Reddit) than wikinews. Watching everything stream in and sorting out the good stuff is exciting; it's easy to get a lot of neutral eyeballs on it.
