English Wikinews publishes 10000th article

September 7, 2007

The English Wikinews, a collaborative citizen journalism site, published its 10,000th news story today at around 06:56, 7 September 2007 UTC. The 10000th story was entitled Australian comedians "could have been shot" during APEC prank, a follow-up story on Australian TV show The Chaser breaches APEC security; 11 charged. The article was created by accredited Wikinews reporter Nathan Carter from Bathurst, Australia, under his username Cartman02au.

The countdown by Wikinews members has been happening for several weeks, and the site administrators thanked all contributors with the message "Thanks for supporting Wikinews for 10,000 articles and counting!", which displays on top of all pages.

The closest other Wikinews projects are the German Wikinews, with approximately 6383 articles, and the Polish Wikinews with 5211 articles. Wikinews has projects in 22 different languages, which totals 40,897 articles.

Wikinews, a sister project of the collaborative free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has been described in many articles by mainstream media as the most extreme form of citizen journalism, allowing readers to write and edit the news content. In contrast to other citizen journalism websites such as OhMyNews and Indymedia, Wikinews articles adhere to the neutral point of view policy.

In the group of projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation which controls Wikipedia and Wikinews, the latter is the only project that allows original reporting, an aspect that is actually discouraged on other projects. Wikinews has some 25 active accredited reporters who have produced a variety of highly local news and interviews, for example with UK politician Tony Benn. Some articles are about Wikipedia, for example the recent reporting on the anonymous post to the Chris Benoit article which seemed to predict the death of his wife Nancy. Most articles on Wikinews however are summary articles based on published news sources.

In the Wikimedia family, Wikinews has been one of the slowest growing members. Several factors contribute to this, including the popularity of Wikipedia and the fact that Wikipedia also has articles on current events and even a current events portal.

Wikinews moved out of its test phase in December 2004. The previous milestone was the 5000th article on April 29, 2006.

Wikinews articles can be used, and have been used, by others under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.