Apparently enough Wikinews participants were upset enough with the (lack of) support from the Wikimedia Foundation, that they spun off to build a new wiki news site.

One intrepid reporter is already using the site to break important media-industry news.

I think it's less dissatisfaction with the WMF and more of a difference in principles between half of the Wikinews regulars.

Wikinews shouldn't be hard to be beat, right now--it's more dead than most of the other non-Wikipedia wikis.

Is there a list of grievances? That mailing list post doesn't say much.

Not enough Poetlister.

The new OpenGlobe, once it had me on the editorial staff, seemed to attract the likes of Poetlister and Mr. Suarez.

That assumes that it's a valid idea in the first place. But in hindsight, it really isn't. Any news stories big enough to require a wiki for collaboration can be (and are) found in Wikipedia.

It's not really collaborative, though. On Wikinews, 99% of articles are written primarily by one person.

There are plenty of user-driven news sites online. I'm more interested in whether this Open Globe can beat them.


I seem to remember a period last year when some higher-up Wikinews admins tried to ban an editor whose grandmother died. Turned out there was a big misunderstanding and the site basically lost half of its writers.

That was the Brian McNeil scandal.

Most of the diffs were wiped by his buddies. Still plenty left, though.
Brian, Cirt and the other goobers are still firmly "in charge" of the turd-pipe called Wikinews,
despite most of their contributors quitting in the past couple of years......

(Blood Red Sandman, the idiot who tried to block Matthew Edwards for one billion years,
applied for CU and oversight powers on Wikinews earlier this year.
Fail, despite getting 16 YES votes....that place is a joke.)