http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
I did a little research by asking somebody with who I worked with at BBC Worldservice between 1995 and 1998. I was in BBC Wordlservice for short period in 1998, starting in "BBC Networking Club" in 1995. He said that the BBC News in Simple English was produced between 1988 (or 1989) and 1994. The news in Simple English (Basic English) was stopped since it was very difficult to take news, translate into Basic English and the transmit before the news became "stale". The aims and objectives of BBC Worldservice allowed the translation, but resources allowed were strictly limited: specialists in Basic English had to be employed on this news service.
In relation to the Simple English Wikipedia http://simple.wikipedia.org/ similar considerations apply. How many Basic English experts are able to spend time translating 1,000,000 pages (1,000,000,000 words) or start from scratch?