Daniel Mayer wrote:

However, at this point in time, we simply do not have the resources to do real news reporting (which isn't simply rewriting news reports by others but involves expensive primary research, travel and interviewing). But until/if we do, our process of updating Wikipedia in near real-time as history unfolds will do just fine.

I certainly don't want to push Wikimedia to move into new areas any quicker than it can. In practice, however, I think you may find that you have more resources than you realize for reporting. IndyMedia doesn't have a big budget for travel and so forth; it gets most of its materials from people who live or travel on their own dime to the places where they report, and they've been fairly successful. There are IndyMedia centers in dozens, if not hundreds of cities now. It would be nice to see some hybrid of Wikipedia and Indymedia, where you get Indymedia's focus on current events and its system of local centers, combined with the Wiki technique of peer review editing.

So there is no reason to divert these efforts to another project for a long time (if ever). Doing so could hurt Wikipedia in profound way.

Actually, there *is* a reason. Wikipedia sometimes suffers from an embarrassment of too many riches. It gets so much traffic that the server bogs down. One way to achieve scalability might be to direct visitors to different "channels". (Of course, that would require some serious prior thought about how to avoid redundancies and fragmentation.)