Wikinews is one of the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, which “is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge” [Wik05].

As stated in its charter, “Wikinews is a free content news source [...]. Wikinews allows anyone to report news on a wide variety of subjects. Its mission, as stated on the main page, is to create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events. [...]

Wikinews started with the establishment of a demonstration wiki in November 2004, which was then moved into beta stage one month later. In the middle of March 2005 there were already more than 1,000 articles in Wikinews” [Wiki05].

In contrast to other news portals Wikinews enables users to write articles in a collaborative manner. While Yahoo! News and Google News only categorize news published online by news agencies, newspapers, TV stations and the like, indymedia.org is the news site that comes closest to the idea behind Wikinews. The www.indymedia.org newswire allows for open and even anonymous publishing of self written articles and enables users to comment on other users articles. However, it is not possible to edit published articles. Indymedia focuses on enabling reporters to publish articles independent from “corporate coverage” [Ind06], but does not support the collaborative development of content.