User:Plenty/Humorous critique of Wikinews

I copied this from Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense,
where it was placed by user Amgine. I don't know whether
Amgine wrote this version or whether it was taken from a
community-edited version of my original story.

Humorous critique of Wikinews

May 19, 2005

A controversy emerged on the Wikinews site today in a dispute regarding its purpose, and whether it contained sufficient original reporting to be a viable source of news. The controversy opened a passionate debate over what news is, and whether WikiNews' recent reporting offers sufficient value to the community.

Wikinews was founded as an outgrowth of the Wikipedia project, after it had been noticed that Wikipedia was finding success in including daily blurbs about things in the news. WikiNews was founded as an effort to capture that activity, towards the goal of becoming a useful source of "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) news.

Unfortunately, the project had a slow start, and the activity on the site was limited; they found a heady challenge in generating news articles every day, and finding people to contribute was difficult. Yet the project was able to overcome these challenges. According to one WikiNews researcher, the project generated 60 stories over the past week (May 13 to 19).

Despite the improvement in volume of news, the researcher commented that much of that volume seems to simply replicate information found in stories published by other news media such as Reuters, ABC News, and the BBC, as well as various regional sources ranging from ITAR-TASS to the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, SC. Of the 60 articles reviewed, the researcher judged 1 as original reporting, 1 as original reporting of already published material, 4 as partially original, and the remaining 54 as just restatements of other news reports.

The original report was the article, Exclusive Interview: Piano Man is possibly a British actor, an interview with someone who believes he recognizes a recently publicized missing person.

The controversy arose when the reporter posted his study as a news article on WikiNews. Several in the WikiNews community immediately disputed the validity of the report as a news item, opening a passionate discussion on the article's "talk" page. At issue was a stipulation made by the researcher that WikiNews' would only be valuable if it had a larger proportion of original reporting. Several editors felt this stipulation represented a non-neutral opinion that violated the sites' policies, some found it unfair or inaccurate, and others felt the whole issue was not really newsworthy.

It is routine for news organizations to use stories derived from articles originally reported through other sources. Few news organizations have the resources and access to conduct original reporting on all news that they wish to present to their readers. Organizations such as Reuters and AP Newswire were founded with exactly this need in mind.

One of WikiNews' founding purposes was to provide a new outlet for reporting these stories that would allow the community to use the wiki process to combine facts from multiple sources and to ensure the reporting is done in a fair and neutral manner. Original reporting is also a stated goal of the project, but no policy exists regarding what proportion of stories should be original reports.

Sources

• "Unpublished report" by user 'Plenty'
• http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Wikinews_needs_you%21