All, I'd like to congratulate the entire Wikinews community for passing another threshold as today the English edition of Wikinews created our 10,000th article. While the total article count is not nearly as important to a news site which depends on the flow of articles more than the total volume of content, this is still a significant symbolic figure and one that we are very proud of. With about 10 articles published per day on average, about 17,000 users, almost 20 average edits per article, and somewhat under three years under our belt, we've managed to build a wealth of news content available to the world under a free license. We focus on synthesizing free-content versions of news that is reported elsewhere, as well as using our community to create original reporting not available anywhere else. Throughout the years we've remained somewhat different from a lot of other similar projects. Within the Wikimedia family we are the only project that depends on continued story flow rather than just being able to be built up over time. We are also the only site with an explicit goal and mandate to publish original reporting and research, yet still staying subject to the NPOV and other core Wikimedia values. We also try to connect ourselves with the outside world: we allow trusted members to become "accredited reporters", we invite collaboration with sites that want to mirror or use our content, and even invite folks to call in on our telephone hotline. Outside of Wikimedia, we are one of the larger citizen journalism websites in terms of visits and users. Unlike most sites, we do not allow editorial content and stick to newswire-style reporting; unlike almost all sites, all content is licensed for unrestricted use subject only to attribution. Unlike almost all other citizen journalism sites, we do not allow ownership or authorship of articles: they are owned by the wiki, and no single person is on the by-line of our articles. All said, these modes of operation are unique within the citizen journalism space and create both opportunities and challenges as we continue to grow. Wikinews still has a lot to learn and a lot to do. We are still struggling to grow our story flow; we are not as widely read or respected as we think we should be; we have trouble with using MediaWiki at times since the platform wasn't really developed for a news site. We have challenges in integrating into the larger framework of citizen journalism, in part since we do not allow the opinionated, POV content that drives a good subset of other citizen news efforts. We are still not getting the level of crossover from Wikipedia that we probably should be getting. Yet we are very hopeful and enthusiastic about our future. We are getting some technical changes in place to make our site a lot more lively, interactive, and useful. We are looking forward to Single User Login helping increase Wikipedia-to-Wikinews crossover. We are reaching out to other sites that share our mission and are trying to establish collaborative efforts to help us grow and help Wikimedia fulfill its mission. So please join me in congratulating the Wikinews community, and indeed the entire Wikimedia community, for helping us reach this milestone. It may seem symbolic, but for us Wikinewsies it is definitely worth a celebration. -ilya haykinson _______________________________________________ Wikinews-l mailing list Wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l