Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-03-31/News_and_notes

by CamelCaseCondo • 4 months ago

47 9 4 months ago

en.wikipedia.org

Kim_Bruning2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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_Bruning2• 4 months 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>

snvzz• 4 months ago

Good call.

Hopefully they can now focus on making Wikipedia itself neutral.

Mr_Eri_Atlov• 4 months ago

You've already got grokipedia

bit-anarchist• 4 months ago

And?

LunaSea• 4 months ago

In other unrelated news, the C-suite is expecting a raise this year.

powera• 4 months 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.

xacky• 4 months ago

Will this change AFD discussions over the commonly cited WP:NOTNEWS? Also Wikimedia has too many small wiki sister projects that are mostly being overrun with vandalism as there are not enough editors to monitor it, especially with AI bots making it trivial to make thousands of edits.

Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down

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