Wikinews
2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet
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| URL | http://www.wikinews.org/ |
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| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | News wiki |
| Registration | Optional |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Community |
Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikinews allows anyone to report news on a wide variety of subjects. Its mission, as stated on the main page of the English version of its website, is to "create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events".
Unlike Wikimedia's other projects, Wikinews contents are mostly available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or later.
History
In January 2003, a two-line proposal under the title Wikews was created on the Wikipedia community's Meta-Wiki via an anonymous post by Daniel Alston , later known on Wikipedia as Fonzy. Alston, however, was not involved in the development of the project, and the proposal was redeveloped by Erik Möller, the Wikipedia contributor known as Eloquence. The proposal suggested the creation of a sister project covering "news on a wide variety of subjects, unbiased and in detail." In 2004, the discussion about when and how such a project might start became more active. Early opposition from long-time Wikipedia contributors, many of them pointing out the existence of Wikipedia's own news summaries (" Current events"), 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 Sunday, March 13, 2005, the English edition of Wikinews reached 1,000 news articles.
On Saturday, April 29, 2006, the English edition of Wikinews reached 5,000 news articles.
Additional projects
While Wikinews focuses primarily on text articles, members are expanding the philosophy into other media. These projects include Audio Wikinews, which delivers Ogg Vorbis audio files, and Wikinews Print edition, which is a daily edition intended to be printed.