LunaSea
an hour ago
In other unrelated news, the C-suite is expecting a raise this year.
Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down
23 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by CamelCaseCondo6 Comments
Kim_Bruning
2 hours ago
Oh that's too bad, it was an interesting concept while it was running. I did notie that it takes a lot more effort to do real world journalism than it is to write an encyclopedia. And accreditation is a tricky thing in a pseudonymous community.
Hendrikto
2 hours ago
The idea was cool, but WMF is doing too much, just like Mozilla. They should focus on their core offering.
I don’t think this is a bad move, they might even want to divest from their other side projects too. They are mostly distractions and money sinks.
Kim_Bruning
an hour ago
Ah, it is/was a volunteer community, so not really a thing the WMF needs to put much effort in besides running the server. I bet even I could take over the job if I really wanted to, and not because I'm amazing or anything. Well at least, if this were 2010 or so. By now scraper mitigation might be a challenge. <scratches head>
powera
22 minutes ago
Wikinews never worked; the principle of "verifiability" that Wikipedia was based on simply doesn't work for news-collection, which requires trusted first-party accounts.
The project was also already dead; the English Wikinews has had 10 "articles" posted in the last 3 weeks, two of which were trivial sports stories (a second-division Queensland football match, and the retirement of a pitcher whose last substantial year in MLB was 2019). The most recent story is that an amateur jazz group recently played at a library.
It will no longer be an attractive nuisance to the few who stumble across it. Rest in peace.
snvzz
2 hours ago
Good call.
Hopefully they can now focus on making Wikipedia itself neutral.