Wikinews is a great idea, but is it viable?

I’ve decided to start reposting relevant Dutch-language articles from Wikinews on News from Amsterdam. Wikinews is a sister project of Wikipedia. Its contributors describe themselves as follows:

We are a group of volunteers whose mission is to present reliable, unbiased and relevant news. All our content is released under a free license. By making our content perpetually available for free redistribution and use, we hope to contribute to a global digital commons. Wikinews stories are written from a neutral point of view to ensure fair and unbiased reporting.

It would seem a bit naive to simply claim that your writing is neutral and unbiased. The strength of Wikinews rather lies in providing a place were the merits of a story and its sourcing can be discussed on the basis of arguments. In times of clickbait, hoaxes and fake news, that’s an interesting concept.

Wikinews operates without ads (which matters). Their website may look a bit austere, but since it’s all open source, anyone can resuse the content with a different layout.

For now, Wikinews mainly consists of syntheses of news published by other media, but the site also invites other types of stories such as investigative reporting; (photo) reports and opinion articles. This could also provide room for another goal of Wikinews, which is to cover stories that are underreported in other media.

But is Wikinews viable? The consensus seems to be that it’s not. As Jonathan Dee of the New York Times put it in July 2007: «Wikinews … has sunk into a kind of torpor; lately it generates just 8 to 10 articles a day on a grab bag of topics that happen to capture the interest of its fewer than 26,000 users worldwide …».

That was ten years ago. Since, activity on the English-language version of Wikinews has further declined, as the chart below shows. Meanwhile, there’s a remarkable rise in the number of articles on Dutch-language Wikinews.

Perhaps this is a temporary boost of enthusiasm, that will fade out after a while. Then again, maybe it’ll last and Wikinews will reinvent itself. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.