WIKINEWS

'Wikinews' is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article."^[1]
The neutral point of view policy implemented in Wikinews distinguishes it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews.^[2]

Contents

History

Additional projects

Criticism

References

External links

History

In January 2003, a two-line proposal under the title ''Wikews'' was created on the Wikipedia community's Metawiki via an anonymous post by Daniel Alston. He was not involved in the development of the project, and the proposal was redeveloped by Erik Möller. The proposal suggested the creation of a sister project covering "news on a wide variety of subjects, unbiased and in detail."^[3]. Early opposition from long-time Wikipedia contributors, many of them pointing out the existence of Wikipedia's own news summaries, gave way to detailed discussions and proposals about how it could be implemented as a new project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In November 2004, a demonstration wiki was established to show how such a collaborative news site might work. In December 2004, the site was moved out of the "demo" stage and into the beta stage. A German language edition was launched at the same time. Soon editions in Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Italian, Serbian, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Norwegian, and Chinese (in that chronological order) were set up.
On March 13, 2005, the English edition of Wikinews reached 1,000 news articles.
In September 2005, the project moved to the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.^[4]
On April 29, 2006, the English edition of Wikinews reached 5,000 news articles.
On September 5, 2007, the English edition of Wikinews reached 10,000 news articles.

Additional projects

While Wikinews focuses primarily on text articles, members are expanding the philosophy into other media. These projects include , which delivers Ogg Vorbis audio files, and , which is a daily edition intended to be printed.

Criticism

Like Wikipedia, (see Criticism of Wikipedia), Wikinews is also criticized for its perceived inability to be neutral or include only verified and true information. Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica criticized the credibility of the project [1]:
McHenry was skeptical about Wikinews' ability to provide a neutral point of view and its claim to be evenhanded. "The naivete is stunning," he said.

References

1. Wikipedia Creators Move Into News
2. The Unassociated Press
3. Wikimedia Foundation Meta-Wiki: Wikinews talk page archive
4. Wikinews switches to Creative Commons license

External links

★ Wikinews: Multilingual Portal

★ Wired News: Wikipedia Creators Move Into News

★ Wikinews RSS Feed

★ Wikinews Original Reporting RSS Feed