Cmwhite

Hello

My name is Clare White and I am one of the participating professional journalists who believes that Wikinews will be a major news organisation in the future.

I'm not around much at the moment because my time is being taken up with other projects. And it's a bit heated round here at the moment, isn't it? But I pop back when I can.

Wikinews activities, of varying levels of triviality:

• Quaker portal
• A template for eyewitness reports
• A flag template
• A temporary Rwanda newshut
• Portals and community building
• Skills portfolio project (in development)

Stories I have been significantly involved in writing:

• Protests over UK preparations to deport Kurd Iraqi asylum seekers
• Clothes from China piling up on European borders
• Young Quakers disappointed by UK visa denials
• Former British Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam dies
• Somalia food hijackers make new demands
• Peace tax campaigners turned down by UK judge
• Coordinated terrorist attack hits London
• World Bank president addresses global youth forum on genocide
• Government of Zimbabwe forces thousands out of their homes
• British lecturers meet to vote on Israeli academic boycott

What is the point of Wikinews?

(Watercooler debate: my evangelicalism is too boring to be put there)

• Wikinews gives us the chance to build up an alternative to the mainstream media, who have become increasingly irrelevant, are prone to push their own interests and, in the case of Britain, sometimes incite racial hatred in order to sell more copies
• News is not a commodity, nobody should own it, so why should it be hawked? We have the ability now to report what is going on around us, cherrypicking those parts that are good from the mainstream media and ignoring the advertising and agendas. Parasitical? Maybe, but so is a newspaper producing a special edition on bomb victims.
• Wikinews gives all of us the chance to be involved in the news and to suggest solutions. It is a sysnthesis of views and truths and, empowered to investigate and retell for ourselves, we are better placed to bring about world peace.
• Wikinews can achieve 24 hour rolling coverage, with bureaus in an unlimited number of countries.
• What better fix for news junkies than to write their own?
• Wikinews has a completely different agenda than the Western mainstream. It provides news that people care about.
• Wikinews gives people skills in writing, editing and news gathering as well as all sorts of other skills. It's far better than a work experience placement (unless that work experience placement gets you working on Wikinews)
• Wikinews could provide the sum of current affairs, the whys, whens, whats and hows - with real answers provided by real people.
• Wikinews contains no more plagiarism than the rest of the media - it is well worth the public knowing that. Its source and neutrality rules are more tightly policed and rigorous than the vast majority of news outlets

... to be continued