The document summarizes a presentation about Wikinews, an online news project similar to Wikipedia. It provides statistics showing that the largest Wikinews community is the Serbian one, despite the English version having more users. It also discusses debates around whether Wikinews has failed to achieve its goals of original reporting and building an engaged community, due to challenges with its editing process, competition from other sites, and language-specific focus.

1. Wikinews: brief review and general considerations Presenter: Marco Frassoni, SoNet group, http://sonet.fbk.eu Presented on: 13/08/2010

2. SoNet Research Meetings These slides were used for an internal presentation of the SoNet group. Every week, one member of the SoNet group presents a research papers to the other members. The mentioned paper(s) are hence written by other researchers. Being internal presentations, these slides might be a bit rough and unpolished. You can find more information (including this presentation) about the SoNet group at http://sonet.fbk.eu

4. Did Wikinews fail? Did Wikinews fail in achieving its goals? Did it manage to meet its creators' expectations? There has been a debate within the WMF (WikiMedia Foundation) community about Wikinews failure, and moreover what has to be done with Wikinews project. Low interest around it According to some opinions, Wikinews should be quitted and the found spent on its development moved to new projects. Others do not agree saying that Wikinews has enough page-views per day and a good amount of donations. Actually, Wikinews generates much less web traffic than other minor WMF projects as Wictionary, Wikisource or Wikibook. The community Moreover, Wikinews community has never really started-up, and this is possible due to a combiation of causes: difficulties in the articles' creation process, including collaboration with other authors, NPOV policy, undergoing a review process, fit to a style guidelines, ... [4,6] Wikipedia concurrency (“In The News” category, “Current event” template, ...) [4,8] aggregative content production is easier than collaborative content production [8] other citizen journalism on the web (OhmyNews, Newsvine, AgoraVox, Indymedia, ...) language-centred rather being topic-centred, this prevent the building of interest-based communities [6]

5. Did Wikinews fail? Did Wikinews fail in achieving its goals? Did it manage to meet its creators' expectations? There has been a debate within the WMF (WikiMedia Foundation) community about Wikinews failure, and moreover what has to be done with Wikinews project. Numbers and stats Started on November 2004, at the present day the English Wikinews has around 17,000 articles. What is more important, the outcome of Wikinews in terms of number of articles per day is way beyond expectations, with an average of 5 to 10 news per day on the en.wikinews.org (checked in August 2010, http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:NewPages ) Original reporting Wikipedia's cofounder, Jimmy Wales, said that Wikinews “aims to include more original reporting” [3]. According to the result presented by with their research [1], Wikinews has failed in achieving this goal. This is probably due to the Wikinews NPOV policy, to the requierments of reliable sources and to the peer review process.

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