Wikinews is to news what Wikipedia is to encylopedic-style reference material: a publicly editable site for comprehensive coverage of current affairs. It has posted a mission-statement and requirements and is calling for votes from the public on whether it should actually launch.
We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.
Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports – because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps – because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.
While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source – even a non-neutral one – on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.
(via Joi)
