What is Wikinews?

A naive description of Wikinews comes to the conclusion, that outdated news are recycled and put on the website no one cares. On the other hand, many people belief that Wikinews is a great project so what is the clue?

At first, the assumption is true, that a Wikinews article contains of outdated news. And now we can answer the question why this information aggregation make sense. Suppose, the Guardian newspaper has written a new story about an event. This is equal to content. The article contains of images and text. If the URL to this article is forwarded to a Wikinews article this is equal to document the content. The term documentation in a library point of view means to create a meta-information which is equal to a bibliography.

According to the wikinews article, the original Guardian article was written in the past. That means, Wikinews is a watchblog for the guardian article. Or to be more specific, Wikinews peer reviews all the newspapers in the world. At least the part of them who is written in English and has a larger size.

To understand what Wikinews is, we have to define what meta-information / a documentation / a bibliography is about. The idea is to increase the abstraction level, to aggregate information and to sort the chaos. The main problem in today's information society is, that the amount of informations grows. The amount of newspapers and blogs has increased over the years and the fear is that the information overload is too much. The answer to the issue is twofold: fulltext search engines and information aggregation. Google websearch is a typical example for a search engine, while Wikinews is a meta-website which documents what the newspapers have written.

This point of view helps to understand why Wikinews is there. Because the amount of information in the world is large and some kind of management is needed to categorize and aggregate the content. The funny thing is, that Wikinews doesn't has a monopol on that job. It is possible to found a second Wikinews project and do the same on that platform. The reason why it's not done yet is because information aggregation is costly. If somebody likes to summarize existing content, he has to invest manpower. And this is only be done, if a clear advantage is the result. The former technorati project was dedicated to the goal, to summarize blogging content. It was canceled because the manual effort to maintain the website was to high. In theory, the same outcome is imaginable for Wikinews. If the project is shutdown, then the user can ask Google news for the latest headlines.