"Wikipedia for news" might be a brief statement of the purpose of Wikinews, but it isn't an attempt to solve the problem I'm concerned to solve. Wikipedia made encyclopedias better by making a giant encyclopedia. Wikinews didn't make news better...in any way. What we want to do is actually organize the news, including the "long tail" of citizen journalism, into "small pieces, loosely joined" in the form of one-sentence fact summaries. The result will enable a scalable community to co-author a truly useful, complete, and giant selection of the news, without the noise and confusion that besets the news today. So that's the difference.

This I could get behind. If you were to strip the adjectives out of the stories (both literally and figuratively, it would not only remove some of the inherent bias, but also a lot of the noise. For example: "A police officer shot a man during an altercation over Lucky Charms in Sometown, California. The shooting is currently under investigation.

And that's it. You report the facts of the investigation and then the public has an unbiased view of the facts, without the subtle nuances that introduce bias. Such as, "A black police officer shot a Vietnamese man. Until the facts of the case reveal that race was a motive, then those details presumptively introduce race as a motive. That's the kind of journalism that is successful financially because it generates strong emotions, and thus viewers however it's subtly dishonest not because those facts aren't true, but because of the motivation behind why those facts where included.

This is Larry Sanger, one of the original founders of Wikipedia, but he disagreed with it very early and left to start a competing project, “Citizendium”, which went slowly and stagnated a few years back.

I'd prefer to say that it started with a bang (it really did) but slowed way down due to the unsupportable weight of trying to compete with the 800-pound-gorilla, Wikipedia. :-)

Larry came up with the idea for Wikipedia and was the community manager in Wikipedia's vulnerable early days.

Let's help him create a 2nd top ten website instead of being another HN troll criticizing bravely on the Internet.

Also, isn't it harmful to divert effort that could be going into WikiNews to a different project? WikiNews already struggles from a lack of editors. Is this substantially different in some way?

So, everyone interested in this idea should put their efforts into a failed project. No alternatives, because that would be harmful to a project people clearly aren't interested in developing.

If wikinews isn't able to get this idea working, why is everyone else required to keep supporting it. Maybe it's time for an alternative.

If it's not working, then it needs needs to figure out why people aren't engaged. Otherwise, the natural progression is for people to move on to an alternative.

Agreed.

But Wikinews isn't some just started website. It launched in 2004.

The idea that everyone needs to keep working on it until it's successful is becoming a joke.

It's been a decade. It hasn't worked.

People should feel free to develop an alternative. Wikinews has no right to a monopoly on an idea.

The beatings will continue until Wikinews makes something people want

Exactly.

Yes, it's very harmful to divert all the effort everyone's apparently (not) giving to WikiNews to a different project that actually might succeed in dealing with information overload, starting with front page news.

4 big headlines that are non-newsworthy to almost everybody. The only headline of any relevance was a 10-day old piece about Philae.

WikiNews struggles from a lack of contributors, yes. I don't think creating a competing site is going to help that.

Why not? If nothing else, the new news site is, itself, news, which could serve as a PR boost to attract new contributors. Wikinews is old hat, nobody is going to start contributing there now.

A new site with a fresh start has a better chance of widening its contributorship.