Journalism on Wikinews

Overview
Wikinews is the news-based Wikimedia Foundation sister project to Wikiversity and Wikipedia.

Erik Möller, the current (2010) deputy CEO of the Foundation, is generally credited with being instrumental in getting the project off the ground. With a focus on news, the project is frequently overshadowed by current events on Wikipedia - which, naturally, attracts a far larger contributor base. There are stark differences between "The Free Encyclopedia you can Write", and "The Free News Source you can Write". Encyclopedic articles are continually developing - whereas news articles are a snapshot of what is known at a point in time.

Through negotiation with Google News, project bureaucrat Brian McNeil successfully arranged listing of the English-language Wikinews project in Google's index-cum-agregator; adopting the Wikimedia extension for Flagged Revisions, and technically implementing a formal peer review process which parallels that of traditional journalism to meet Google's requirements and address a perennial contributor gripe.

This, by-and-large, makes Wikinews a unique publisher of Citizen journalism.

Discussion questions

 * What societal benefits can citizen journalism provide?