Wikinews

The first recorded proposal of a Wikimedia news site was a two-line anonymous post on January 5, 2003, on the Wikimedia community's Meta-Wiki.^[3][4] Daniel Alston, who edited Wikipedia as Fonzy,^[5] claimed to have been the one who posted it.^[3][6] The proposal was then further developed by German freelance journalist, software developer, and author Erik Möller.^[3] Early opposition from long-time Wikipedia contributors, many of them pointing out the existence of Wikipedia's own news summaries, gave way to detailed discussions and proposals about how it could be implemented as a new project of the Wikimedia Foundation.^[7]

The domain name wikinews.org was registered on April 2, 2004.^[8] In November 2004, a demonstration wiki was established to show how such a collaborative news site might work.^[7] A month later, in December 2004, the site was moved out of the "demo" stage and into the beta stage under public domain copyleft.^[9][10] A German language edition was launched at the same time. Soon, editions in Italian, Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Norwegian, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, Hungarian, Greek, Esperanto, Czech, Albanian, and Tamil (in that chronological order) were set up.^[9]

In September 2005, the project moved to the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.^[10] On September 7, 2007, the English Wikinews published its 10,000th article.^[11]

Wikinews reporters have conducted interviews with several notable people, including an interview in December 2007 with Israeli President Shimon Peres by Wikinews reporter David Shankbone. Shankbone had been invited to conduct the interview by the America-Israel Friendship League and the Israeli foreign ministry.^[16][17]

Other notable interviews have included writers, actors, and politicians, such as Augusten Burroughs,^[18] several 2008 U.S. Republican Party presidential primaries candidates like Sam Brownback and Duncan Hunter,^[16] and others like British politician Tony Benn,^[19] writer Eric Bogosian,^[20] New Zealand politician Nick Smith,^[21] former New Zealand prime minister John Key,^[22] World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau,^[23] drag queen RuPaul,^[24] and former Wikimedia Foundation executive Sue Gardner.^[25]

As of May 2026^[update], Wikinews content pages have been created in 36 editions, all of which were made read-only on the week of May 4 of that year.^[9] The Wikinews sites had a total of 1,742,748 articles.^[26]

• WikiTribune
• Wikitorial