WikiNews - Good Or Bad?

Grass root journalism? Is WikiNews really an example of true alternative reporting or is it just the work of a bunch of people who lift interesting stories off other sites, rewrite them and submit them to the collaborative news site? Upon closer inspection frighteningly many of the WikiNews stories seem to stem from other well established news sites like BBC, Reuters and AFP.

What is in fact the definition of grass root and citizen journalism? Most of the stuff that fills my screen when visiting WikiNews these days is news I might as well go get at some other media site. It simply mimics the top down communication of "old" media. There is no real original reporting.

I'm slowly changing my opinion of the site.

Technorati tag: Media |Journalism

Comments

[Erik Moeller]

There are many examples of stories containing original reporting on the site -- click my name. Of course we rely on news agencies such as Reuters, AP, AFP, ITATAS, etc. as sources: as does any news paper or website. Even a story that is a synthesis of news content published elsewhere is not without value, though, see the arguments in
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/State_of_the_Wiki , particularly in the section "Alex says ..". Finally, if you want to see more original reporting on the site, contribute your own. :-) There's really no good reason not to -- the site is advertising-free, run by a non-profit foundation, and the content is available to anyone without restrictions. So anything you contribute can be reused in blogs or on other news sites. It's not "locked in" as is the case with some other "citizen journalism" sites.

[Erik Moeller]

Correction: ITA-TAS=>ITAR-TASS. See, if this was a wiki, I could have just edited the comment ;-)

[Dan100]

Yup, you're quite right, almost all our stories are re-written from other sources (just as all of Wikipedia is - we're just a bit more open about it).

This is, actually, where we excel. Read any one news article on an event and it could be biased, could be missing important information, or could be plain wrong.

On WN, we can draw on _all_ the available sources of information, meaning our articles are free from bias, contain more info than other individual articles, and are more accurate because of all the fact-checking we do.