WikiNews is a very serious and dangerous trend in journalism, and should not be called citizen journalism. While a collaborative work, it employs self-styled but untrained volunteers to edit and censor stories. This trend toward the new world of journalism gives voice to anonymity under the guise of impartiality, but is lacking in credibility that professional journalists must adhere to.

WikiNews should be seen as nothing more than a cacophony of voices in the wilderness of irresponsible journalism. I'll take my editor's years of instinct and experience over a template and untrained online editor anyday.

Let's get back to the basics of solid reporting and ignore this internet babble. It's no more credible than a teenager chat room. Are we so desperate to fill pages and airtime that we have to turn to the wiki, waki world of crap.

If we want to see a federal shield law, let's not grant journalistic credibility to poorly disguised citizen journalism.

I would say it is better than blogging, in that there is need for objectivism, but not much better.

Political blogging is collapsing in New Zealand as it gets nastier and nastier. The same can be seen in parts of Wikipedia, and will no doubt spread to WikiNews.

I must say I'm puzzled at Paul J. Elliott's comments, I can't tell whether is is because citizen journalism is a threat to him, or whether he is completely uninformed on the process.

Wikinews has adopted the Wikimedia foundation's Neutral Point of View policy, in fact that's written into the project guidelines. A core community of users defend this principle, in much the same way the BBC defends their impartiality. I'd like to think that if you read a sampling of our stories you will discover the end result is usually the same sort of accurate reporting.

Wikinews is not, has never been, and will not become, a blog. We don't allow op-ed pieces. There is no regular editorial, just news, complying with the above-mentioned policy.

As a regular contributor to wikinews, I'd point people to coverage of the Indian Ocean Tsunami or the UK oil storage depot file as where wikinews might end up one day. At the moment, we're just a poor mans AP.

The AP is a filtered, conservative news organization. It tends to under-report (or fail to report) anything negative re Iraq war or Current White House. So I seriously doubt Wiki will become the next AP.