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| “ | I thought of another brilliant sister project idea: Wiki + news = Wikews. | ” |
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. Most of these ideas were ultimately not incorporated into the project, seeing little support. Had they been adopted, they might have pushed the project in a very different direction, leading to a very different situation today.
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.
Among the many policy suggestions made for the project was the requirement for wikinews reporters to publish articles under their real name, as opposed to an anonymous pseudonym. One participant suggested that the use of a users real name would make it easier for readers to determine if the author would have first hand knowledge of the subject, and seperate them from those without a credible claim to such experience or associated information. Writers would still be able to cite anonymous sources, as long as they are trusted by the community. It was also suggested that original reports could require consensus to be published, with the commenter citing concerns over the credibility of the project being of key concern. Another user labelled a consensus based restriction as being a dangerous policy, allowing for the "exclusion of undesirable reports by objecting to them".
| “ | A news article is a historical record and should not be altered at will. | ” |
One proposal which was suggested was to use a multiple points of view (MPOV) policy, as opposed to the neutral point of view (NPOV) used for Wikipedia. It was suggested that an MPOV policy would allow readers to to get a more complete understanding of a topic through many different perspectives, and allow articles to be published faster without needing to achieve consensus.
| “ | All the things which where proposed to solve the problem of an open _and_ useful news website target towards a CMS [Content Management System] and not a Wiki. | ” |
| “ | [...] I find it quite scary that Wikimedia is heading towards a hierarchy where there are these "classes" of contributors and where only when your identity is revealed can you actually contribute. I'm sorry to say this... but that will never work. | ” |
| “ | aren't there enough news sources in the world? the wiki model works great for Wikipedia but won't work for a news site. | ” |
Right from those early discussions, many Wikimedians voiced doubts, and many of the suggestions for the form the project should take was founded on those doubts. The ability of news to be reported in a wiki format was questioned, and the moderation required to make it work would make it not be a wiki anymore.
The suggestion to require real names arose from doubting if people could learn to trust original reports from anonymous individuals. The suggested multiple points of view policy argued that neutrality would be to slow to keep up with the news cycle. Concerns were raised over conflicting laws across countries around what reporters could say and how such a project could comply with those laws.
I don't know if any of the ideas covered in these discussions could've saved Wikinews. What's clear to me is that creating the project required the community to strike a compromise between speed, neutrality, openness, and trust, where finding any approach that would work long term would be a monumental challenge, let alone a balanced approach where it could thrive. Thats not to say the project didn't have its successes, such as what Erik Möller highlighted in his response to my questions. The wiki also saw some major scoops, such as this one on unrest in Belize back in 2005, or the 2,579 original reports on English Wikinews, or any of the other amazing reports on the site.
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