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Thanks for responding. To be sure, I'm asking the following questions in good faith as I want your site to work. > Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allo

by mjolk 10y ago

Thanks for responding. To be sure, I'm asking the following questions in good faith as I want your site to work. > Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events. If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies. > Each news event comprises only the factual information in the source article. Even if the source is highly partisan we can still extract non-biased information. Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial. > Also, because each post goes through editorial review, the potential for fake new is minimised. Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.

sparkzilla 10y ago
>If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies. We don't simply cite the source. We extract the factual information in the source into the post. When New York Times reports "Evil Trump is coming to the UK" and Breitbart reports, "Our friend Trum is coming to the UK", the news event that Trump is coming to the UK is the same in both cases. Now, the facts may be misreported, but that's a different issue. We do some tagging for obvious rumors, and we hope to improve our tools for labeling the veracity of how each new event is reported. But we belive we have a solid base to work from. >Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial We use a combination of paid and crowdsourced staff. It doesn't really matter who "we" are, because the process is the same in either case to extract the factual information. You only need to trust that we are transcribing from the source correctly, and readers can always go back to the original source to check. So you may wonder, what's the value in that? The value is the creation of the unbiased timeline when all the summaries from diverse sources are compiled. >Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia. While Wikipedia acts like a news archive, its software and policies are not up to the task. There are similarities to what we do compared with Wikipedia and at first we considered ourselves to be a "Wikipedia for news". However, we take a more formal approach to adding sources that Wikipedia, which leads to more consistency in the final result. You may want to read my analysis of Wikipedia's failings: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/

by mjolk 10y ago

sparkzilla 10y ago

>If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies. We don't simply cite the source. We extract the factual information in the source into the post. When New York Times reports "Evil Trump is coming to the UK" and Breitbart reports, "Our friend Trum is coming to the UK", the news event that Trump is coming to the UK is the same in both cases. Now, the facts may be misreported, but that's a different issue. We do some tagging for obvious rumors, and we hope to improve our tools for labeling the veracity of how each new event is reported. But we belive we have a solid base to work from. >Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial We use a combination of paid and crowdsourced staff. It doesn't really matter who "we" are, because the process is the same in either case to extract the factual information. You only need to trust that we are transcribing from the source correctly, and readers can always go back to the original source to check. So you may wonder, what's the value in that? The value is the creation of the unbiased timeline when all the summaries from diverse sources are compiled. >Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia. While Wikipedia acts like a news archive, its software and policies are not up to the task. There are similarities to what we do compared with Wikipedia and at first we considered ourselves to be a "Wikipedia for news". However, we take a more formal approach to adding sources that Wikipedia, which leads to more consistency in the final result. You may want to read my analysis of Wikipedia's failings: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/