Community-owned news with WikiNews

One problem is naturally misinformation and abuse in the form of disinformation. Intelligence agencies and militants of all types are capable of infiltrating as news providers when their goal is to shut down or wash any news of consequence. But alt media is of course the most important topic for we the consumers of the all encompassing "information dominance' that surrounds us.

Is wikinews media reform or media revolution?

It's strongly biased in favour of people with decent internet access, typing skills, internet research skills and verbal/logical abilities.

Internet access (still) excludes a lot of the most oppressed people, though not all. Is this a stronger bias in wikinews than in indymedia? Can oppressed people (e.g. in the USA) with poor internet access still participate in publishing and decision-making in Indymedia, while they are excluded from Wikinews? In principle, yes and yes - but practice depends on how much local indymedia collectives really help organise face-to-face, public meetings at which people with poor internet connections really can participate.

The other differences in the biases mentioned above (typing skills etc) probably bias wikinews and indymedia to about the same extent.

There remains the difference that most people contributing to wikinews consider mainstream, corporate news sources to be "reliable". So far they seem rather lazy about including links to *context* from the wikipedia. They also often argue that including context is "not NPOV" (not neutral in the sense of  http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/NPOV ) and there is generally consensus to *remove* background context (e.g. g w bush is a war criminal responsible for killing about 100,000 civilians in Iraq). This turns news into random events independent of context and throws away all the work on the wikipedia which has already had long battles discussing what is "NPOV" for particular wikipedia pages.

This could potentially change if more people really involved in grassroots social justice groups contributed directly to wikinews (remembering that IPs on wikipedia, wikinews, ... are logged by administrators and could potentially be given to the FBI - this is overtly stated (sorry i don't have a quote, you'll have to search)).

Wikinews is at the moment more like media reform than revolution. It's going to become BIG whether grassroots activists participate in it or not: wikipedia has only been around for 4 years (since it became free of the nupedia seven-step review process) and now it's become "the largest, most referred-to encyclopedia on the Internet; larger and more visited even than Britannica."

Wikinews officially started in Nov 2004. By the time of the next US presidential election - Nov 2008 - it's a realistic bet that wikinews will most probably become "the largest, most referred-to news source on the Internet; larger and more visited even than news.google, indymedia, CNN, BBC, NYT, Fox, ...".

Wikinews will very likely be a major factor in affecting who is the next president of the United States.

While having a president is in itself reformist, electing a third party candidate - e.g. from the Green Party - would most likely be a non-reformist reform: a reform which leads to successively larger and larger reforms which snowball into a complete revolution.

So do we want wikinews to be reformist or revolutionary?