Wikinews is a free-content news
source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation
. The site works through
collaborative journalism.
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."The
neutral
point of view policy espoused in Wikinews distinguishes it from
other
citizen journalism efforts
such as
Indymedia and
OhmyNews. In contrast to most projects of the
Wikimedia Foundation, Wikinews allows original work under the form
of original reporting and interviews. The English Wikinews is the
only Wikimedia site that grants
press
passes to reporters endorsed by the local community.
History
The beta version logo, used until
February 13, 2005
The first
recorded proposal of a Wikimedia news site was a two-line anonymous post on January 5, 2003, on
Wikipedia community's Meta-Wiki
. Daniel Alston, who edited Wikipedia as
Fonzy, claimed to have been the one who posted it. The proposal was
then further developed by German freelance journalist, software
developer and author
Erik Möller.
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. , 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
Italian,
Dutch,
French,
Spanish,
Swedish,
Bulgarian,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Romanian,
Ukrainian,
Serbian,
Japanese,
Russian,
Hebrew,
Arabic,
Thai,
Norwegian,
Chinese and
Turkish (in that chronological order) were
set up.
On
March 13,
2005, the
English edition of Wikinews reached 1,000 news articles. Just a few
months later in September 2005, the project moved to the
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
license.
On April 29, 2006, the English edition of Wikinews reached 5,000
news articles. On September 5, 2007, just over a year later, the
English edition of Wikinews reached 10,000 news articles.
Additional projects
While Wikinews focuses primarily on text articles, members are
expanding the site into other media. These projects include
Audio Wikinews, which
delivers
Ogg Vorbis audio files,
Wikinews Video 2.0 and
Wikinews Print edition, which is a
daily edition intended to be printed.
On April 28, 2008 Wikinews also started the plans for
Wikimedia Radio which is aimed at a
24/7 streaming audio broadcast of various programs and news, mainly
from participating Wikimedia projects.
Interviews
Wikinews reporters have conducted interviews with several notable
people. The site reached a milestone when it became what is
believed to be the first
citizen
journalism news site to interview a sitting head of state. In
December 2007, Wikinews interviewed
Israeli President and
Nobel Peace Prize recipient
Shimon Peres. Some other notable interviews
have included writers, actors and politicians, such as
Augusten Burroughs, 2008 Republican
nomination hopefuls and independent/third party candidates for
President,
Tony Benn,
Eric Bogosian,
Nick Smith and
John Key, and World Wide Web co-inventor
Robert Cailliau.
Criticism
Like Wikipedia (see
Criticism of
Wikipedia), Wikinews is 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:
McHenry was skeptical about Wikinews' ability to provide a neutral
point of view and its claim to be evenhanded: "The naïveté is
stunning."
In a 2007 interview
Sue Gardner, at that
time a special adviser to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation and
former head of the
Canadian Broadcasting
Company's Internet division, CBC.ca, dismissed McHenry's
comment, stating "Journalism is not a profession ... at its heart,
it's just a craft. And that means that it can be practiced by
anyone who is sensible and intelligent and thoughtful and curious
...
I go
back to the morning of Virginia Tech
- the morning I decided I wanted to work here
[WMF]. The conversation on the talk page that day was
extremely thoughtful. I remember thinking to myself that if my own
newsroom had been having a conversation that intelligent (I was
offsite that day) I would have been delighted. So yes, [in my
opinion] you absolutely have proved Robert McHenry wrong. And you
will continue to."
Wikinews has also had issues with maintaining a separate identity
from Wikipedia, which also covers major news events in real-time.
Columnist Jonathan Dee of
The New
York Times has pointed out that "So indistinct has the
line between past and present become that Wikipedia has
inadvertently all but strangled one of its sister projects, the
three-year-old Wikinews... [Wikinews] has sunk into a kind of
torpor; lately it generates just 8 to 10 articles a day... On
bigger stories there's just no point in competing with the ruthless
purview of the encyclopedia."
References
External links
Wikis
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