Wikinews
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Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism through user-created content. 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."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Wikinews's neutral point of view policy aims to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews.<ref name="newyorktimes1">Template:Cite news</ref> In contrast to most Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikinews allows original work in the form of original reporting and interviews. In contrast to newspapers, Wikinews does not permit op-ed.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
As of August 2025, Wikinews sites are active in Template:NUMBEROF languages,<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> with a total of Template:NUMBEROF articles and Template:NUMBEROF recently active editors (editors that contributed to the site in the last 30 days).<ref name=":4">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Early yearsEdit
The first recorded proposal of a Wikimedia news site was a two-line anonymous post on January 5, 2003, on the Wikimedia community's Meta-Wiki.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Daniel Alston, who edited Wikipedia as Fonzy,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> claimed to have been the one who posted it.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The proposal was then further developed by German freelance journalist, software developer, and author Erik Möller.<ref name=":1" /> 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.<ref name=":2">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
The domain name wikinews.org was registered on April 2, 2004.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In November 2004, a demonstration wiki was established to show how such a collaborative news site might work.<ref name=":2" /> A month later, in December 2004, the site was moved out of the "demo" stage and into the beta stage under public domain copyleft.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":3" /> 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, Albanian, and Tamil (in that chronological order) were set up.<ref name=":0" />
In September 2005, the project moved to the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.<ref name=":3">Template:Cite news</ref> On September 7, 2007, the English Wikinews published its 10,000th article.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Recent developmentsEdit
In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation organized the Wikimedia Hackathon in Istanbul, Turkey, from May 2 to 4, bringing together the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Additionally, the Foundation announced a new AI strategy aimed at enhancing editor support through AI-assisted workflows, improving information discoverability, and facilitating the onboarding of new volunteers with guided mentorship.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
InterviewsEdit
Wikinews reporters have conducted interviews with several notable people, including an interview in December 2007 with Israeli President Shimon Peres by Wikinews reporter David Shankbone. Shankbone had been invited to conduct the interview by the America-Israel Friendship League and the Israeli foreign ministry.<ref name="biginterview">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Other notable interviews have included writers, actors, and politicians, such as Augusten Burroughs,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> several 2008 U.S. Republican Party presidential primaries candidates like Sam Brownback and Duncan Hunter,<ref name="biginterview" /> and others like British politician Tony Benn,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> writer Eric Bogosian,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> New Zealand politician Nick Smith,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> former New Zealand prime minister John Key,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> drag queen RuPaul,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and former Wikimedia Foundation executive Sue Gardner.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
CriticismEdit
Wikinews has been criticized for its alleged inability to remain neutral in perspective and provide verifiable, reliable sources. In 2005, Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica, criticized the credibility of the project:
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McHenry was skeptical about Wikinews' ability to provide a neutral point of view and its claim to be evenhanded, saying that "[t]he naïveté is stunning."<ref name="newyorktimes1" />
In a 2007 interview given to Wikinews, Sue Gardner, at that time a special adviser to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation and former head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Internet division, CBC.ca, dismissed McHenry's comment, stating:
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Journalism is not a profession ... at its heart, it's just a craft. And that means that it can be practiced by anyone who is sensible and intelligent and thoughtful and curious ... I go back to the morning of Virginia Tech – the morning I decided I wanted to work [at the Wikimedia Foundation]. The conversation on the talk page that day was extremely thoughtful. I remember thinking to myself that if my own newsroom had been having a conversation that intelligent (I was offsite that day) I would have been delighted. So yes, [in my opinion] you absolutely have proved Robert McHenry wrong. And you will continue to.<ref>"Interview with Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation", Wikinews; October 24, 2007.</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}
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Wikinews has also had issues with maintaining a separate identity from Wikipedia, which also covers major news events in real-time. Columnist Jonathan Dee of The New York Times said in 2007 that "So indistinct has the line between past and present become that Wikipedia has inadvertently all but strangled one of its sister projects, the three-year-old Wikinews... [Wikinews] has sunk into a kind of torpor; lately it generates just 8 to 10 articles a day... On bigger stories there's just no point in competing with the ruthless purview of the encyclopedia."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Andrew Lih and Zachary M. Seward commented on the continuing issue in a 2010 piece in the Nieman Journalism Lab called "Why Wikipedia beats Wikinews as a collaborative journalism project." Lih wrote "it's not clear that the wiki process really gears itself towards deadlines and group narrative writing" and that "if you're trying to write something approaching a feature piece, it's much harder to get more than two or three people to stay consistent with the style."<ref name="lih">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lih considers Wikipedia's stricter "formula" for article composition an advantage in a large wiki with many editors.<ref name="lih" /> Brian Keegan wrote in 2019 that the Wikinews model of requiring approval before publication ultimately limited its ability to grow, especially compared to the more open nature of Wikipedia.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Thomas Roessing wrote in The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies in 2019 about journalism on Wikipedia and Wikinews: "Many people turn to Wikipedia for more information after they received news from the mass media ... There is a substantial danger of havoc resulting from hasty handling of information about an unfolding situation."<ref name=":5">Template:Cite book</ref> Roessing presents the issue of a "citation cycle", where professional journalists turn to Wikipedia for research, but the Wikipedia community goes to mass media sources for breaking news articles. Roessing writes about the problem of differentiating Wikipedia and Wikinews: "The quality and the speed in which Wikipedia responds to news is one of the challenges to Wikinews."<ref name=":5" /> Additionally, Roessing refers to an analogy made by author Matthew Yeomans: "Usually, Wikinews retells stories that were first published by Internet outlets of the traditional mass media (which also serve as sources for Wikinews' articles). This tends to result in "dull regurgitation of facts" as Yeomans (2005) put it."<ref name=":5" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Language editionsEdit
As of August 2025, there are Wikinews sites for Template:NUMBEROF languages of which Template:NUMBEROF are active and Template:NUMBEROF are closed.<ref name=":0" /> The active sites have Template:NUMBEROF articles and the closed sites have Template:NUMBEROF articles.<ref name=":4" /> There are Template:NUMBEROF registered users of which Template:NUMBEROF are recently active.<ref name=":4" />
The top ten Wikinews language projects by mainspace article count:<ref name="Siteinfo">Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved August 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab</ref>
| No. | Language | Wiki | Articles | Total pages | Edits | Admins | Users | Active users | Files |
|---|
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External linksEdit
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