As Wikinews has reached its sunset, I decided to look back to the very beginning of the project, and the visions some users had for the project.

Erik Möller, a former deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation was involved in the discussions which ultimately led to the creation of Wikinews. When asked by The Signpost about the sister project, Eric provided the following response:

My general take is that Wikinews has had difficulty scaling up for a simple reason: a short and incomplete encyclopedia article is still useful, while a short and incomplete news article quickly stops being useful. The pressure to write and quality check a daily output of fully fleshed out stories is simply not something that can be easily sustained on a volunteer basis. As I recall, some of those who were against Wikinews at the time said pretty much exactly that. They were right.

Despite this, I have no regrets that the project was launched. In addition to a large archive of freely licensed news summaries, Wikinews has done some unique citizen reporting over the years. I would recommend checking out https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Interviews in the English version for example. Personally I look back fondly to writing https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview_with_LibriVox_founder_Hugh_McGuire, however magazine-like it might be. While I fully support the Wikimedia Foundation's decision, I still think wikis themselves are a fine tool for enabling journalistic work. Perhaps in combination with crowdfunding or other models of financial support (and maybe with a narrower reporting focus), a similar community effort can thrive in the future.

— Erik Möller (user:Eloquence)

One proposal envisioned a site aimed to "catalog and document news sources, articles and media" for notable events, in chronological order, as well as being organised by scope. It would allow contributors to take small excerpts of reputable works to archive the essential information in the event where a news article is taken down allowing ti to be used to support content material on Wikipedia. It would aim to preserve the charateristics of bias present at the time of the articles creation, reflecting history as it was recorded.

The functions in this proposal bear similarities to the Internet Archive from its founding in 1996, to how it is used to support Wikipedia article content today. The proposal did not gain traction in the discussions at the time, but reflects a very different vision of what the project may have been.

• proposal to require reporters to use their real names for the project.
• Consensus should be included for an original report

• Became the n:Wikinews:Archive conventions

• Also cover editorials