Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, just as the more known Wikipedia. The site works through collaborative journalism.
Some people claimed it failed in its attempt but I was not able to find a report about this (evolution over the years, quantity of editors involved, news produced, … and more interestingly health and diversity of the active community).
Ironically, the only relevant information I found is in a Knol, the Google alternative to Wikipedia.

Wikinews has been in existence for several years now, and yet the English-language version has only 15,000 articles. Considering that Wikipedia has already surpassed three million articles, that is a sad testimony to the effort to keep Wikinews alive. Wikinews for the most part merely regurgitates news already covered elsewhere, and no other news outlet, to my knowledge, quotes Wikinews. Wikinews never fulfilled it’s objective, and should be allowed to die a graceful death.

In addition to that, Wikinews has been allowed to be taken over by a clique of individuals pushing a power play to silence any opposition, either to their own point-of-view or the point-of-view of their e-friends. That is anathema to any free society project. Whenever one group uses power to punish opposition, and that opposition has no actual and effective recourse (there is no appeal process), than the project must be shut down. When a conflict occurs and it is deemed useful to dole out punishment of any sort, the entire conflict must be reviewed and all sides punished in an equitable fashion. Wikipedia learned this rule, only after creating thousands of vandals, some of which are still going strong.

Do you have any experience with WikiNews?