Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Sister Projects Task Force/Results of the consultation about Wikispore and Wikinews
This is the Sister Project Task Force's recommendations to the Community Affairs Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The Board will make a decision based on the outcomes from the public consultation that took place from June to August 2025.
Wikispore
No immediate changes should be made to Wikispore's current technical setup. The current setup is functioning and supports ongoing experimentation, and bringing Wikispore into the WMF technical setup at this point of time would add necessary technical constraints that would not well support Wikispore's evolution.
Exploring options to more closely align Wikispore with the Wikimedia Incubator is encouraged, potentially as a dedicated subdomain or pilot project for a fixed period (e.g., two years). This would simplify processes and allow lessons learned in Incubator to inform Wikispore's trajectory, if this can be done while not restricting Wikispore's growth.
Wikinews
Archive all editions of Wikinews, preserving their content.
The implementation (including the timeline, archival method, etc) are the responsibility of the Product & Technology department, but the process should be sensitive to local project contexts and follow inclusive, transparent processes.
The Wikimedia Foundation should support and provide resources to groups exploring new paradigms for Wikimedia news content, such as the proposed “Wikinews Pulse” centralised multilingual headline portal. It should set a fixed timetable (e.g., one year) for these pilot initiatives to demonstrate progress, after which results should be publicly reviewed and further recommendations made.
Appendix: Results of public consultation on Wikispore and Wikinews
The community consultations on the future of Wikispore and Wikinews ran on Meta-wiki from July 27th to August 19th. It was initiated by the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) – a temporary body consisting of members of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees and wikimedians in good standing, selected following an application process on Meta.
General notes on the consultations
The consultation followed an advertisement on Diff, Wikimedia-l, and the central community pages, such as Village Pumps, on Wikinews and other bigger Wikimedia wikis.
Most of the consultation was conducted on Meta-wiki; there were also three open community calls – two in English and one in Russian. The recordings and notes were shared on Meta.
There was also an in-person meeting at Wikimania, attended by the SPTF members and community members, including a Wikinews administrator.
There was concern that one month was not enough time for the consultation, so it was extended. However, the bulk of the discussion occurred during the first month.
Several Wikinews editors expressed disappointment that the Wikinews communities were not informed in advance of the general consultation.
Results of the consultations
Wikispore
Discussion of 36KB, 12 contributors. There's evident enthusiasm for experimentation and growth through initiatives like Wikispore—but also concern about whether institutional processes and infrastructure can support that ambition.
Wikispore proponents asked for more precise criteria for activities that would lead to recommendations to open a new project, and for easy access to statistics on community health, such as those relied on in the evaluation, so they could self-evaluate and monitor progress towards those goals.
The current proposal from the Wikispore creator, Pharos, with the most support from community discussions and RfCs, is to transfer Wikispore to a subdomain of the Incubator for a 2-year pilot.
Wikinews
Summary
Except for several active Wikinews editors, the majority of consultation participants reached a broad consensus that, in its current format, Wikinews doesn't contribute to the mission of effectively developing and disseminating free knowledge.
A prominent idea emerging from the consultation is “Wikinews Pulse”, a centralized, data-driven multilingual headlines portal that would draw from Wikidata and link to Wikipedia and local Wikinews projects. This concept garnered some support as a revitalization alternative.
Proposed Wikinews alternatives:
- Wikimedia Enterprise/Breaking news
- A prototype for the English language portal Wikipedia Trending.
Discussion
SPTF initiated a consultation following an internal evaluation of Wikinews, which flagged it as the least active Sister Project, citing declining engagement and structural concerns.
The consultation included a 1.046 MB discussion on the Meta-wiki page with approximately 100 participants from various wiki-projects, including representatives from Bengali (currently in the Incubator), Chinese, German, and Russian Wikinews, accompanied by ancillary discussions in other projects (Russian Wikinews and English Wikivoyage).
Community response
The talk page is structured into sub-topics, featuring thousands of individual comments and over 100 different contributors across the discussion. Notable threads include:
- Toward a more solution-oriented assessment – a major hub of discussion (~59 comments).
- News articles are not a good fit for the wiki model – around 22 comments debating whether the nature of news aligns with Wikimedia's editing model.
- Some participants argued that traditional news cycles and wiki structures are mismatched, making Wikinews inherently unsuited to the Wikimedia model.
- Others strongly disagreed, emphasizing that the “wiki model” is broader than Wikipedia and that news can indeed work within that framework—especially with reforms.
- Long-time participants noted that Wikinews lacks a clear focus or consistent purpose—neither serving as an encyclopedic news summary nor excelling in original reporting.
- Some highlighted the continued value of original reporting and argued that Wikinews still aligns with the Foundation's educational and free-content goals.
- Several voices raised concerns about how the consultation was initiated, citing a lack of prior outreach to local Wikinews communities and a perceived rush or insufficient inclusivity. SPTF did not generate a sufficient community interest and remained low-key even after concluding a public consultation on the process for opening/closing projects, until the public consultation on Wikispore and Wikinews. There was an RfC questioning its legitimacy as a way to overturn the possible outcomes of the consultation.
The questions
The consultation sought community feedback on the potential future of Wikinews, following the established procedure of the taskforce. Options included:
- Restructuring the project and improving its integration with Wikipedia.
- Merging Wikinews content into relevant Wikipedias (possibly in a distinct namespace).
- Migrating it to compatible external platforms.
- Archiving the project entirely.
Restructuring
Editors spend a considerable amount of time reading, writing, and reviewing news-related material. Can we restructure current Wikinews workflows, incorporating aspects that have worked well in the past, while linking them to other current events efforts on the project?
- Multilingual tools: Wikinews Pulse (Wikidata, service for Wikinews or for Wikipedias)
- Recognize that a tremendous amount of work is done on articles about news, but scattered across projects
- Open question: is there a facility for original interviews or reporting (e.g. at events?) Compare: WikiPortraits has a news-like presence + gets press passes at dozens of conferences, festivals, and other convenings.
- Small procedural changes
- Increase engagement.
- Increase article output. (i.e. to levels from previous years)
- Reduce bureaucracy. (reviewer bottleneck)
- Refocus on news about the wikiverse / merge with community journalism about itself and free knowledge
- Refocus on original content/reporting instead of synthesis, potentially by banning articles that purely consist of synthesizing existing sources.
Restructure may involve moving back to the Incubator, even for large projects.
- Return smaller projects to Incubator. Discourage creating new language editions while exploring restructuring.
- Compare what happened to WikiTribune (Question: how were its articles archived?)
- Return smaller projects to the Incubator and discourage the creation of new language editions while exploring some restructuring.
Merging into Wikipedias
The most detailed and successful coverage of (high-profile) current events happens on Wikipedias. Can any content from Wikinews be merged into relevant language Wikipedia projects?
- Which other projects link into Wikinews / when did they stop? Which Wikinews editions link into Wikipedia and other projects?
- Images are already hosted on Commons; how often are they also used in relevant Wikipedia articles?
- Are there other places where people can share original reporting (text, images?) on a) notable topics that can have their own Wikipedia article, b) local topics
No support for this option as it would require considerable technical investment without clear advantages.
Finding a new home
If projects are merged or archived: the current projects could be merged into compatible-licensed external projects. What are candidates for this?
- Continuing to work or experimenting with new ideas in Incubator or Wikispore
- Migration to a project on a wiki host: single language or multilingual? [wants examples]
- Incorporation into another citizen journalism site.
No specific sites ready to host Wikinews have been suggested; integration could be difficult for anything that didn't have similar structure.
Archiving
There's a consensus that Wikinews, as currently set up, has not met its goals. Most Wikinews languages have low activity, with the most active projects having at best tens of active editors. Compared to other sister projects, the freshness of articles is much more important to a news site. Even in projects that allow post-publishing updates, there's not much activity, unlike in Wikipedia articles. Archiving the existing project would preserve the content while minimising the risks and burden of maintenance.
However, different language projects have various levels of activity; what are the criteria for archiving? Communities are engaged in the discussions about the requirements for opening/closing, and the timeframe.
Conclusion
Overall, the consultations highlight the request for clearer processes, stronger community engagement, and more flexible infrastructure to facilitate both the incubation of new projects and the revitalization—or eventual sunsetting—of struggling ones. The outcomes point to a future where experimentation is encouraged, but where sustainability and alignment with Wikimedia's core mission must guide decisions about which projects endure.