[lsanger]

"Wikipedia for news" might be a brief statement of the purpose of Wikinews, but it isn't an attempt to solve the problem I'm concerned to solve. Wikipedia made encyclopedias better by making a giant encyclopedia. Wikinews didn't make news better...in any way. What we want to do is actually organize the news, including the "long tail" of citizen journalism, into "small pieces, loosely joined" in the form of one-sentence fact summaries. The result will enable a scalable community to co-author a truly useful, complete, and giant selection of the news, without the noise and confusion that besets the news today. So that's the difference.

[briandear]

This I could get behind. If you were to strip the adjectives out of the stories (both literally and figuratively, it would not only remove some of the inherent bias, but also a lot of the noise. For example: "A police officer shot a man during an altercation over Lucky Charms in Sometown, California. The shooting is currently under investigation.

And that's it. You report the facts of the investigation and then the public has an unbiased view of the facts, without the subtle nuances that introduce bias. Such as, "A black police officer shot a Vietnamese man. Until the facts of the case reveal that race was a motive, then those details presumptively introduce race as a motive. That's the kind of journalism that is successful financially because it generates strong emotions, and thus viewers however it's subtly dishonest not because those facts aren't true, but because of the motivation behind why those facts where included.