Wikinews

 ( Official Website ) 

The domain name wikinews.org was registered on April 2, 2004. In November 2004, a technology demo 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 version stage under public domain copyleft. A German language edition was launched at the same time. Soon, editions in Italian language, Dutch language, French language, Spanish language, Swedish language, Bulgarian, Polish language, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Serbian language, Japanese, Russian language, Hebrew language, Arabic language, Thai language, Norwegian, Chinese language, Turkish language, Korean language, Hungarian, Greek language, Esperanto, Czech language, Albanian, and Tamil language (in that chronological order) were set up.

In September 2005, the project moved to the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. On September 7, 2007, the English Wikinews published its 10,000th article.

Other notable interviews have included writers, actors, and politicians, such as Augusten Burroughs, several 2008 U.S. Republican Party presidential primaries candidates like Sam Brownback and Duncan Hunter, and others like British politician Tony Benn, writer Eric Bogosian, New Zealand politician Nick Smith, former New Zealand prime minister John Key, World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau, drag queen RuPaul, and former Wikimedia Foundation executive Sue Gardner.

McHenry was skeptical about Wikinews' ability to provide a neutral point of view and its claim to be evenhanded, saying that "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 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." 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." Lih considers Wikipedia's stricter "formula" for article composition an advantage in a large wiki with many editors. 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.