SOURCE: kuro5hin.org

Wikinews And The Growing Wikimedia Empire (Internet)

By Eloquence
Sun Dec 5th, 2004 at 07:53:56 AM EST

After almost two months of deliberation and voting, the Wikimedia Foundation has now officially launched the Wikinews project in English and German editions. More languages will follow soon. Wikinews aims to be to news media what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias: a free, comprehensive and, eventually, reliable source of information, collaboratively created by volunteers around the planet. Wikinews explicitly allows original reporting, making it somewhat similar to Indymedia, while adhering to a strict Neutral Point of View policy.

Read on to find out what the Wikimedia community has accomplished so far, what challenges it faces, and how Wikinews can become successful.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an international non-profit organization which operates volunteer-driven projects driven by wiki technology. Wikis are websites which anyone can edit - wiki pages are collaboratively created by many different people over time. Various mechanisms are used to control the changes that are made and to review existing articles. These mechanisms are continuously evolving, and Wikinews in particular puts the challenge of quality control in the spotlight again.

All content created by the Wikimedia Community is made available under open content licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License, ensuring that it will be freely available for copying and modification forever. Aside from Wikinews, Wikimedia operates the following..

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