Today while celebrating the anniversary of the launch of MSNBC in 1996, I began to think about wiki sources of online news. The original slogan of MSNBC was "It's time to get connected" and a key feature of wikis is the ability to connect and to collaborate with others. I immediately thought of the Wikinews wiki, whose mission is to present reliable, unbiased, relevant and entertaining news. Wikinews is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates several other multilingual and free-content projects, such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks. If you're interesting in contributing to this online news site, check out its Newsroom page, where it lists articles in development, articles marked ready for publishing, articles in dispute, collaboration requests, recently published articles, and lead articles. Like the traditional network news services and their Internet sites, Wikinews is not above controversy. Recently, some Web articles noted that Wikinews might not be as unbiased as they claim, particularly about news items related to the Wikimedia Foundation. The controversy is discussed on The Register and Slashdot. Regardless, it's interesting to watch the site and how communities are collaborating to report the news around the world.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
