Wikinews: Into the Wikiverse

Serendipity

Wikinews: Into the Wikiverse

Contribute —

By Mitchsavl

All quotes are from m:Talk:Wikinews/Archives/2004 unless otherwise specified.

“

I thought of another brilliant sister project idea: Wiki + news = Wikews.

”

As Wikinews has reached its sunset, I decided to look back to the very beginning of the project, and the visions some users had for the project. Most of these ideas were ultimately not incorporated into the project, seeing little support. Had they been adopted, they might have pushed the project in a very different direction, leading to a very different situation today.

Former deputy director of WMF weighs in.

Erik Möller, a former deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation was involved in the discussions which ultimately led to the creation of Wikinews. When asked by The Signpost about the sister project, Eric provided the following response:

My general take is that Wikinews has had difficulty scaling up for a simple reason: a short and incomplete encyclopedia article is still useful, while a short and incomplete news article quickly stops being useful. The pressure to write and quality check a daily output of fully fleshed out stories is simply not something that can be easily sustained on a volunteer basis. As I recall, some of those who were against Wikinews at the time said pretty much exactly that. They were right.
Despite this, I have no regrets that the project was launched. In addition to a large archive of freely licensed news summaries, Wikinews has done some unique citizen reporting over the years. I would recommend checking out https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Interviews in the English version for example. Personally I look back fondly to writing https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview_with_LibriVox_founder_Hugh_McGuire, however magazine-like it might be. While I fully support the Wikimedia Foundation's decision, I still think wikis themselves are a fine tool for enabling journalistic work. Perhaps in combination with crowdfunding or other models of financial support (and maybe with a narrower reporting focus), a similar community effort can thrive in the future.

— Erik Möller (user:Eloquence)

Wikinews as an index

One proposal envisioned a site aimed to "catalog and document news sources, articles and media" for notable events, in chronological order, as well as being organised by scope. It would allow contributors to take small excerpts of reputable works to archive the essential information in the event where a news article is taken down allowing it to be used to support content material on Wikipedia. It would aim to preserve the charateristics of bias present at the time of the articles creation, reflecting history as it was recorded.

The functions in this proposal bear similarities to the Internet Archive from its founding in 1996, to how it is used to support Wikipedia article content today. The proposal did not gain traction in the discussions at the time, but reflects a very different vision of what the project may have been.

Real name and original reports

Among the many policy suggestions made for the project was the requirement for wikinews reporters to publish articles under their real name, as opposed to an anonymous pseudonym. One participant suggested that the use of a users real name would make it easier for readers to determine if the author would have first hand knowledge of the subject, and seperate them from those without a credible claim to such experience or associated information. Writers would still be able to cite anonymous sources, as long as they are trusted by the community. It was also suggested that original reports could require consensus to be published, with the commenter citing concerns over the credibility of the project being of key concern. Another user labelled a consensus based restriction as being a dangerous policy, allowing for the "exclusion of undesirable reports by objecting to them".

Page protection

“

A news article is a historical record and should not be altered at will.

”

Wikinews developed archiving conventions, where pages would be protected from editing shortly after they were published, keeping them to serve as a permanent record. Articles would be permanently locked after 14 days, allowing time for minor spelling and grammar issues to be corrected.

Multiple points of view

One proposal which was suggested was to use a multiple points of view (MPOV) policy, as opposed to the neutral point of view (NPOV) used for Wikipedia. It was suggested that an MPOV policy would allow readers to to get a more complete understanding of a topic through many different perspectives, and allow articles to be published faster without needing to achieve consensus.

Doubts from the start

“

All the things which where proposed to solve the problem of an open _and_ useful news website target towards a CMS [Content Management System] and not a Wiki.

”

“

[...] I find it quite scary that Wikimedia is heading towards a hierarchy where there are these "classes" of contributors and where only when your identity is revealed can you actually contribute. I'm sorry to say this... but that will never work.

”

“

aren't there enough news sources in the world? the wiki model works great for Wikipedia but won't work for a news site.

”

Right from those early discussions, many Wikimedians voiced doubts, and many of the suggestions for the form the project should take was founded on those doubts. The ability of news to be reported in a wiki format was questioned, and the moderation required to make it work would make it not be a wiki anymore.

The suggestion to require real names arose from doubting if people could learn to trust original reports from anonymous individuals. The suggested multiple points of view policy argued that neutrality would be to slow to keep up with the news cycle. Concerns were raised over conflicting laws across countries around what reporters could say and how such a project could comply with those laws.

Closing thoughts

I don't know if any of the ideas covered in these discussions could've saved Wikinews. What's clear to me is that creating the project required the community to strike a compromise between speed, neutrality, openness, and trust, where finding any approach that would work long term would be a monumental challenge, let alone a balanced approach where it could thrive. Thats not to say the project didn't have its successes, such as what Erik Möller highlighted in his response to my questions. The wiki also saw some major scoops, such as this one on unrest in Belize back in 2005, or the 2,579 original reports on English Wikinews, or any of the other amazing reports on the site.

← Previous "Serendipity"

In this issue

22 May 2026 (all comments)

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

I find the "CMS" comparison/critique of Wikinews very fitting. But at the same time, I can't help but wonder about how our talk pages are basically also CMSes. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:04, 23 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There are so many Wikinews eulogies written across the wiki-verse... Anyway, if the only "sin" that wikinews has is "low contributor activity," I guess there are plenty of other Wiki sister projects next on the execution bench. Niryhpr! 13:25, 23 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Low contributor activity is a very serious issue. Each language had on average 22 volunteers. That is about as much as a local news station in Middle-of-Nowhere, United States, that also receives support from the national branches of NBC, FOX, CNN, ABC... To make things worse, the quality of workers was also likely lower due to the nature of Wikimedia projects. Being anonymous means that someone very unqualified to be doing journalism could easily report on it. I would argue that reporting on the news requires a lot more training than writing an encyclopedia. Even if we assumed everyone went to college and got degrees in journalism (or communications at the very least), the fact that they are not paid means that the volunteers can write one news story and get off for the day. Speed is also more important in a news-based field than encyclopedia writing so we would essentially need all 22 volunteers churning out half a dozen articles per day to be any sort of use when covering all the world's news. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 13:44, 25 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
A local news station gives pretty good output—I have an incredible admiration for the original content created on Wikinews—and I haven't heard of incidences of fake news on Wikinews. Plus, the point of Wikimedia is to get unqualified volunteers to do things.
We don't need to cover all the world's news if doing so adds nothing to the existing coverage out there, and what it brought in addition was Wikinews's great strength that I haven't seen available anywhere else. In solidarity, Aaron Liu (talk) 14:49, 25 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It wasn't the only sin of Wikinews, but it was the fatal one, and the root cause of several others. A requirement for Wikinews articles to be reviewed first before being posted caused delays and too often meant that fine work was deemed "stale" and wasted. The adoption of NPOV rather than MPOV was a major error. Too few contributors put too much reliance and too much power in the hands of too few. Sadly, a couple of the major contributors died. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:00, 26 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Due to the ongoing, full court attack on the Internet Archive by mainstream news outlets, there is ironically a greater need for Wikinews now than ever before. Viriditas (talk) 00:27, 24 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-07-10/Op-ed - It's not like the project hasn't had issues for years, and nothing was ever done about it. At least in the early 2010s, it had become dominated by a very small group of editors, who decided what was published, and often did not do so in a timely manner, with anything unpublished being fully deleted, wasting the work. Why would anyone want to work on a project with a very high chance of any work you did being fully deleted? I stopped editing the Signpost over a far smaller number of deleted articles. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.7% of all FPs.} 01:18, 31 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
But the Chinese Wikinews absolutely was not this. Less than 10 active editors, half a month between articles, and deleting stale drafts, sure; but the top 3 mentioned in Proposal for Closing Wikinews all joined quite recently (respectively, 2020, 2024, and 2021. Ironically, 2024 had an April Fools article about Wikinews being closed.) so this was no exclusionary cabal, articles were frequently double the length of those on ennews and inclusive of unique original synthesis or reporting (and I never saw a modern ennews article like that patron day one either), and last time I checked (during the closure discussions) completed drafts were seldom rejected save for spam; they were even iterated upon by a few different editors.
Funnily enough, the page announcing the decision to close even says different language projects have various levels of activity; what are the criteria for archiving?. That did not stop it from concluding in the blanket closure of all languages without ever addressing this apparently-not-a-rhetorical question. In solidarity, Aaron Liu (talk) 02:56, 31 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Fair. I guess the low activity might've been enough, but it probably should've had a lot more discussion. I think the biggest argument for English Wikinews existing I heard was that people were able to use it to get a press pass sometimes. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.7% of all FPs.} 16:56, 2 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost is written by editors like you – join in!

Home

About