   #copyright

Wikinews

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet

   CAPTION: Wikinews

   The current Wikinews logo.
       URL      http://www.wikinews.org/
   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.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinews"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
