Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia cofounder 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." Wikinews's neutral point of view policy aims to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews. In contrast to most Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikinews allows original work in the form of original reporting and interviews. As of 2022, Wikinews sites are active in languages, with a  total of articles and recently active editors. Wikinews editors are known as "wikinewsies." 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. A month later, 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, Albanian, and Tamil (in that chronological order) were set up. On March  13, 2005, the English edition of Wikinews reached 1,000 news articles. 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 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. Other notable interviews have included writers, actors, and politicians, such as Augusten Burroughs , several 2008 U.S. Republican Party nomination hopefuls as well as various U.S. independent and third party presidential candidates, Tony Benn, Eric Bogosian, Nick Smith, John Key, and World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau. Criticism. Wikinews has been criticized for its perceived inability to remain neutral in perspective and provide verifiable, reliable sources. Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the "Encyclopædia Britannica", criticized the credibility of the project: McHenry was skeptical about Wikinews' ability to provide a neutral point of view and its claim to be evenhanded: "The naïveté is stunning." 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: 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" pointed out 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." Andrew Lih and Zachary M. Seward commented on the continuing issue in a 2010 piece in the Nieman Journalism Lab, "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." Lih considers Wikipedia's stricter "formula" for article composition an advantage in a large wiki with many editors. Language editions. As of 2022, there are Wikinews sites for languages of which are active and are closed. The active sites have articles and the closed sites have articles. There are registered users of which are recently active. The top ten Wikinews language projects by mainspace article count: For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics: