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Wikipedia founder to fight fake news with new Wikitribune site

Rogue Valley

Rogue Valley

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Wikipedia founder to fight fake news with new Wikitribune site

By Alex Hern
Monday 24 April 2017

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Photograph: Felix Clay

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign. Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology. Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on. And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and sub-edit published articles. Describing Wikitribune as “news by the people and for the people,” Wales said: “This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals writing stories as they happen, editing them live as they develop, and at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts.”

Like Wikipedia, Wales’s new project will be free to access. The publication is launching on Tuesday 25 April with a crowdfunding campaign pre-selling monthly “support packages” to fund the initial journalists. The first issue will follow soon after. The community contributors will play a key part in the new site, ensuring that the contents of the articles are always supported by as much extra information shared with the readers as possible. He added: “If you take a look at Wikipedia, it’s noisy and not a perfect place, but for true fake news, there’s been almost no impact on the Wikipedia community. “The volunteers are experienced enough to know it’s nonsense, and have an ethos saying: ‘No, we’re here for neutral facts’: that community knows it from the ground up.” Those contributors who also support the site financially will eventually be able to advise on the topics they want Wikitribune to explore, Wales said.
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I wish the project all success :thumbs:

The initial/supporter page can be accessed here: WikiTRIBUNE
 
I question its potential for success. Traditional Wikipedia pages require hours and hours of edits and contributions to get them to a reasonable standard.

It's going to be tough for this to maintain Wikipedia's standards and still provide timely news.

That and the fact that "fake news" just means anything disagreeable to the person judging it. Wikipedia's pages on more controversial topics tend to be of lower quality and are often even locked from being edited by members without certain credentialing.

Enforcement of standards becomes more laborious and time consuming. The news reported through this method may well end up being long since irrelevant by the time it can be edited to the quality readers might expect from Wikipedia content.

Alternatively, this may just be a con for another person to set up another slanted news source where only certain views pass the test to publish while using the "community" editing angle as an illusion to give the impression of fairness and balance that does not exist.
 
Someone has to start somewhere. Fake news is undermining our democracy.
 
Wikipedia has only worked for non-controversional technical topics which aren't in contention, where it crowd-sources all the details it can get. But for any topic that's in contention, Wikipedia just goes round-and-round and back-and-forth, as different groups vie to overwrite each other's opposing opinions. The Wiki crowd-sourcing approach isn't going to work with something as naturally contentious as news. But everybody has a bias - no way around that - some biased reporting can be through omission rather than commission. How are you going to address the articles that deliberately leave out important facts in order to slant a story?

Maybe what you need is AI - because AI doesn't care and isn't emotionally involved - you can't accuse AI of being "racially biased" or "gender biased" or "politically biased", etc. And you know something - given all the people afraid of being thrown out of work by AI automation, journalists are one group I really wouldn't mind seeing this happen to - couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people, as far as I'm concerned.

*Closes eyes and imagines all the whining crying sobbing Lefties suddenly out of work. Ahhhh...* :cool:
 
Rogue Valley said:
Wikipedia founder to fight fake news with new Wikitribune site



I wish the project all success :thumbs:

The initial/supporter page can be accessed here: WikiTRIBUNE
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I certainly would applaud any effort to bring the truth to what is presented as "news" on websites and other mediums.

However, pulling from the same sources that have championed a biased, ideologically warped media, doesn't fill me with hope this latest effort to define truth will bode any better than all the others.

In the end, the best source to determine true from fake is a rational mind, and a willingness/ability to dig for the truth from verified sources before reaching a conclusion.
 
ocean515 said:
In the end, the best source to determine true from fake is a rational mind, and a willingness/ability to dig for the truth from verified sources before reaching a conclusion.
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Unfortunately no one can provide that for the American citizenry. Every citizen must make that commitment for themselves.
I don't see the harm in taking a new approach. I am cautiously optimistic about this project.
 
RickJames3000 said:
Unfortunately no one can provide that for the American citizenry. Every citizen must make that commitment for themselves.
I don't see the harm in taking a new approach. I am cautiously optimistic about this project.
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I'm in agreement with you.

However, this was the same thing that happened when biased "truth" sites like Politifact, etc., were invented. It turns out for the most part, they were just outlets used by ideologically driven groups in an attempt to add credibility to their memes.

So who fact checks the fact checkers? Is adding another such site going to accomplish anything?

Journalists are at the heart of the fake news the MSM has been dominating the "airwaves" with. Are they now to put their destruction of journalistic integrity down in favor of some sudden desire for honesty?

I remain extremely skeptical, but hopeful.
 
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