Wikinews

» see wikinews.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There is a box near the bottom of a lot of Wikipedia articles listing the sister projects, and Wikinews sat in that box for twenty-one years. I have been reading Wikipedia for most of the time it has been worth reading and I am fairly sure I never followed that link on purpose. Not out of any opinion about it. The link was there, the article I wanted was already open, and I closed the tab.

The idea arrived as an anonymous proposal on a Wikimedia mailing list in January 2003 and was developed into something workable by Erik Möller, a German journalist. It went live on 8 November 2004. Jimmy Wales drew the line for it in one sentence: on Wikinews each story is to be written as a news story rather than an encyclopedia article. That distinction is the entire project and also the entire problem.

Because a wiki is very good at the thing an encyclopedia does, which is accumulate and correct without a deadline, and structurally bad at the thing a newsroom does, which is decide what is true by six o'clock and publish it under someone's name. Wikinews asked volunteers to do the second job using the tools of the first. English Wikinews got to its ten thousandth article in September 2007 and then the curve flattened and never came back.

~ the case file ~

~ why it never worked ~

The competitor was Wikipedia. When something large happens, the Wikipedia article on it starts inside the hour and gets rewritten a hundred times before the day is out, sourced to whoever is already reporting. It is not original journalism, and it does not claim to be, but for a reader who wants to know what happened it arrives faster and it is where the traffic already is.

Wikinews had to originate. That means interviews and verification of things nobody else has printed, all done by unpaid people whose contributions expire in relevance within a day. Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher said the quiet version out loud back in 2018, that perhaps there is only room for one organization like ours. The numbers by the end agreed: just over 700 active editors spread across 31 language versions, and around 120 megabytes of total content after two decades.

~ the vote ~

The Sister Projects Task Force put the closure proposal up on 28 June 2025 and left it open for three months of public consultation. In November 2025 it recommended ending the project permanently. The Board of Trustees made the final call on 30 March 2026, and every Wikinews language edition went read-only on 4 May 2026.

Nothing was deleted. The articles stay online and downloadable in bulk, which is more than most graves on this site can say. What ended was the edit button, and for a wiki the edit button is the organism. A read-only wiki is an archive wearing a wiki's clothes.

~ the first one to go ~

Wikimedia has run sister projects since 2002 and had never closed one. Wiktionary and Wikisource and Wikiversity and Wikivoyage all persisted at wildly different levels of health without anybody having to decide the question. Wikinews going read-only settles that the answer is no longer automatically yes, which is the part of this that matters to the projects still running.

The other thing it settles is older than Wikimedia. Volunteer collaborative journalism has been tried on the open web since at least Indymedia and it keeps failing on the same rock. People will donate labor to something permanent. Very few will donate labor to something that is stale by tomorrow, especially when the deadline is imaginary and the byline is a username.

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