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Wikinews is a free content news source 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, is to "create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events".
History
In January 2003, a two-line proposal under the title Wikews was created on the Wikipedia community's Meta-Wiki by an anonymous user. The proposal suggested creating a sister project covering "news on a wide variety of subjects, unbiased and in detail." [1] In 2004, discussion about when and how such a project might start became more active. Early opposition from long-time Wikipedians, 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, Serbian and Japanese (in that chronological order) were set up.
On Sunday, March 13, 2005, the English edition of Wikinews reached 1,000 pages in the article namespace of the wiki.
On Wednesday, July 20, 2005, the English edition of Wikinews was added to the Google News site for indexing.
Additional Projects
While Wikinews focuses on text articles, members are expanding the philosophy into audio and video fields. Three projects under development — Audio Wikinews, which delivers Ogg Vorbis audio files, — Wikinews Broadcast, which provides video content and, Wikinews Print edition, which is a daily edition meant to be printed for those users who like a hard copy and to bring in more users in by distributing it — hope to become active subprojects of Wikinews, from where they draw much of their content.
Growth
External links
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