Sunday, 10 June 2012

Wikinews - The free news sourse you can write. Sarah Jinhua Yang


Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder 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. According to Thelwall et al., Wikinews has been most successful in covering large news events involving large numbers of people, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech Shootings, where first hand experience, or the availability of first hand accounts, forms a larger part of the entry, and where the wealth of reportage makes a central "clearing house" valuable.

Early years 

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. 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 Italian, Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Norwegian, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, Hungarian, Greek, Esperanto, Czech and Albanian (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. It reached 5,000 articles on April 29, 2006, and 10,000 on September 5, 2007.

Interviews


Wikinews reporter David Shankbone with Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2007.

Wikinews reporters have conducted interviews with several notable people. In December 2007, Wikinews interviewed Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shimon Peres. 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




Wikinews—like Wikipedia—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:

Above all, the central question about the Wikinews effort is its credibility. Making a newspaper is hard...Someone who wants to do it but doesn't really know how hasn't solved the problem by gathering a lot of other people who don't know, either.


McHenry was skeptical about Wikinews' ability to provide a neutral point of view and its claim to be evenhanded: "The naïveté is stunning."

Additional projects

Wikinews members have at times expanded the site beyond text articles. Examples include Audio Wikinews, Wikinews Video 2.0 (test phase) and Wikinews Print edition, and Wikimedia Radio.

For more deatails, pls. refer to http://en.wikinews.org.

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