> Is a “Wikipedia for news” feasible?

I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news", but there are several reasons why it is empty talking.

First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia is the data. Newspapers, TV, now all these news portals are services. There is important difference between data and service.

Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good, which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you, disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably) politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior, people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on wikipedia.

Service is something to be delivered. It must be on time, as "cold news" aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it (no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore). It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more. That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are making is a problem by itself.

Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't even see any claims of how different form them it would be.

Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else. Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.