Open-sourcing the news | Newsmakers | CNET News.com
Here’s an interview about wikinews.
At Wikipedia, we have very, very strong neutral policy. We call it a neutral point of view, and it’s really one of the central organizing principles of everything we do, including the news project. Unlike some other grassroots journalism type of projects like Indymedia, which is a very far left type of thing written by activists, we strive to be a neutral, high-quality source of basic information.
If the mainstream media can’t do good, unbiased journalism, then we’ll have to do it for them.One of the reasons we started it is that we noticed that Wikipedia itself, even though it is an encyclopedia, does a very good job of filling in background information on news reports.
We thought this type of energy could be applied to news as well. There’s an interest in writing more current events type of articles, but they aren’t appropriate for an encyclopedia, so we needed a place to put those, to direct that energy.