Wikinewsie
- "Wikinewsie" was formerly a nickname for users of the now-closed Wikinews project
The Wikinewsie tool, located at wikinewsie.toolforge.org, is built to be Wikimedia's cross-project news platform. It has been proposed as a spiritual successor to Wikinews as a multilingual community-based service, in response to its May 2026 closure.
The current Toolforge-hosted web app is an early prototype focused on content curation that ranks Wikipedia articles based on editing activity over recent hours, in order to identify those current event topics that are the subject of active collaboration. It was begun in July 2026 based on earlier concepts, and still has quite a long way to go!
The prototype is however, available for every language, and Wikimedia users through OAuth can customize the feed and portals, set an image and a string for an event headline, and contribute to its multilingual development.
Technical links:
Vision
[edit]Wikinewsie will ultimately elaborate a more universal, data-driven version of w:Portal:Current events. The platform's generated headlines are to display a variety of daily events from the rich linked open data on Wikidata and elsewhere. Headlines are then to link out to relevant updated Wikipedia articles, and their cited sources, as well as to reporting from associated partners and communities.
Beyond the current tool implementation, the larger vision imagines four elements:
- Portal into Wikipedia: Providing a "front page" and deeper insight into how current events are being represented on Wikipedia.
- Headline generation from Wikidata: Data-driven, human-curated, context-rich summaries of current events, in a machine-readable, language-neutral format.
- Partnership for non-profit journalism: Relationships to provide a shared backbone to public interest projects.
- Community-based reporting: Professional-volunteer collaboration.
Features
[edit]Feed and portals
[edit]Wikinewsie's primary feed is know as the Front Page, and draws from articles in current-year categories using PetScan, if available. These articles are then ranked based on editing activity in a given time window over recent hours, either based on total number of edits, total number of editors, or by a customizable mix of different weights.
Regional and thematic portals provide a series of specialized feeds, and can be publicly edited by users from a Meta-Wiki page. A custom feed may also be curated by an AI feature.
Article curation
[edit]Wikinewsie isn't just an algorithmic feed, but is largely hand-curated by Wikimedians through OAuth. Users can set an image for the article, a string for an event headline, and can use AI features to recap its edit history and suggest further contextual improvements.
Language support
[edit]Wikinewsie is able to track editing activity in any specified Wikipedia language edition, though less active editions will generally require a longer time window, and might lack the current-year categories on which some functionality depends.
The interface text is also gradually being expanded to more languages through translatewiki.net.
Wikimedia NYC stewardship
[edit]
Wikimedia New York City, and particularly its Tech Committee, is interested in stewarding development of this project, in the same way that Wikimedia Deutschland has historically for Wikidata, and in working with the global Wikimedia communities on its implementation. A WMF-affiliate memorandum of understanding is being pursued so that appropriate rights can be officially used for first-year transition activities, and ultimately as the renewed project's domain name.
For an earlier iteration of this concept, see Wikinews Pulse/2025 consultation.