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WikiTribune – Evidence-based journalism

462 points by spearo77 9y ago

spearo77 9y ago
Seems to be overloaded right now, but I found their campaign video via search in Vimeo https://vimeo.com/214586867 https://vimeo.com/214586867
lips 9y ago
Am I just daft or do I not see any sort of workflow described? Do I need to watch the video?
eddieh 9y ago
If only it would load again (too much traffic I presume). I'm prepared to fork over some serious cash.
RhysU 9y ago
Seems like a great way to cite secondary sources. How does this model work for a primary source?
killjoywashere 9y ago
I tried to donate and got a 503 after inputting my credit card. Guess I'll wait for that to settle out for a while...
- xur17 9y ago
  Ran into the same issue. I received a purchase notification from my credit card, but now I don't know if I donated or not...
- NovaS1X 9y ago
  Same issue, but I got through and got a receipt for my sub and donation. Just keep trying. It seems to be up at this moment.
gkoberger 9y ago
Site's down, but here's an article about it: http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-launches-wikitribune-news-by-the-people-and-for-the-people/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wal...
spullara 9y ago
Wow. What a terrible start. I'd expect something a little more robust given the obvious attention it would attract.
resist_futility 9y ago
Anyone know why this is an independent project instead of being part the Wikimedia foundation?
- rand005 9y ago
  > Wales, who sits on the board of Guardian Media Group, the Guardian’s parent company, founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, before donating the entire project to a non-profit organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, that he set up in 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-to-fight-fake-news-with-new-wikitribune-site https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia...
- abdias 9y ago
  Yes, YOU, and me. We can all do our own research to discern what is fake or not.
alva 9y ago
"Facts can be presented with bias, taken out of context and most recently a lot of facts are just plain…made-up. Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring that that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify." Honourable aims for this project, however once you are literally only reporting the presented facts (without bias - aka opinion) surely you are just a Wire Service?
- splawn 9y ago
  we need more "just a wire service" please
  - alva 9y ago
    absolutely. it is just that WikiTribune is not presenting itself that way at all
- tmalsburg2 9y ago
  Are you saying that news media aren't doing more than just adding opinion to facts? Opinion does play a role but the main function and purpose of news media is to contextualize facts which would be useless when presented out of context. This process may introduce some bias but it doesn't have to.
known 9y ago
truth != fact
- peshkira 9y ago
  example?
- hartsdown 9y ago
  It's a fact that 100% of the people I recently surveyed said that the Moon was made of green cheese - I only asked my 6 year-old grand-daughter :-)
anigbrowl 9y ago
Has potential, as a news junkie I'm interested in both using and contributing to this. Heaven knows internet news delivery needs an overhaul. Google could have solved his problem years ago but have instead chosen to profit off it.
- dmos62 9y ago
  How could Google solve this? I'm genuinely interested in what you have to say.
intended 9y ago
Reinventing the wheel, or in this case, reinventing the square wheel. Wikitribune solves a problem, just not the problem they have defined as the target. They've used a naive view of the problem; the model under this ignores the existence of antagonists and too much faith in crowd sourcing difficult problems. Antagonists will prey on services like this, and off the top of my head, here's 2 ways in which such a service can be made biased. 1) baseless accusations, oft repeated. Find the facts inimical to your (the antagonists) position. Ignore them. Find facts which are borderline, and have dog whistle properties - highlight these facts ad nauseum. Say that "Wikitribune is biased". Repeat till it sticks. Then target the facts inimical to you. 2) flood the service with facts that serve your cause- humans have only so much working memory. ---- The particular structure wikitribune has chosen, will result in issues. There's a reason print news papers had an editor and a whole staff dedicated to working together. With volunteers there's no structure, and that causes failures, just consider the Boston bomber case. Of course with a journalist in the mix the assumption is that they will push back. But the structure is supposedly egalitarian, which just means that this is going to end up causing the same politicking, and admin arguing that plagues Wikipedia. Recruit everyone, don't get volunteers. Get the whole team. > Articles are authored, fact-checked, and verified by professional journalists and community members working side by side as equals, and supported not primarily by advertisers, but by readers who care about good journalism enough to become monthly supporters The wisdom of the crowd fails all too often. As another article recently discussed, it's 5% of the people that take up most of your time. How will this structure deal with truly divisive news articles? Or people who have conflicts (and conflicts of interest) within the group? How will you deal with the fact that one day someone can say "volunteer X was a pedophile from <country>!" Kudos for trying it. This looks like a propaganda machine which will use the wiki brand about to be born.
- NovaS1X 9y ago
  I'd rather give this a shot than just shut it down with the cynical negativity that we oft see on HN. There are obvious faults like you have pointed out, but we have to try something to get us out of the the situation we're in. This is the first honest effort I've seen that has some credibility.
clarkmoody 9y ago
I love the idea of trying a new business model for news delivery, especially one centered around facts. I seriously hope this project can overcome the prevalent, subtle biases in media. For instance, every single headline from the recent French election mentioned "far-right" Le Pen without also mentioning any ideological affiliation of the other candidates. Painting your opponent as an extremist is an effective political tactic, and "far-right" certainly sounds extreme. Were most media outlets opposed to Le Pen, hence the extreme label? Why not label any other candidates? I'm not necessarily optimistic about the prospects for unbiased news, but I will be watching this project as it progresses.
- r00fus 9y ago
  They also called Mélanchon "far-left"...
  - jvzr 9y ago
    Well, Mélenchon is far-left. Left is Parti Socialiste. Right is Les Républicains. Far-right is Front National. These are the French definitions of Left and Right, and probably have nothing to do with other countries'. Based on these definitions, the Democrats are Right and Republicans are Far-right. Whether they are good definitions, I can't say. But Mélenchon is definitely not plain Left, or Center.
    - r00fus 9y ago
      Sounds a bit rhetorical. How information is "far-right" and "far-left"? Not much other than to expose a fallacious single-dimension scale. How about terms like "left-socialist" or "right-nationalist"?
- matt4077 9y ago
  They call her "far-right" because that's what she is. The party is called "Front National", after all – "Front" as in war. They don't mind the label. It's simply a description of fact, with the possible caveat that some of their economic ideas aren't that different from those on the far left. The media also regularly labels the other candidates, and nobody is complaining about them any more than Clinton complained when someone said she was left of Trump, politically. Example from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen-france-election.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/europe/emmanuel-mac... "[...]Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to go to a runoff to determine the next president, official returns showed. One is a political novice, the other a far-right firebrand " "Mr. Macron, a former investment banker, abandoned traditional parties a year ago to form his own movement with an eclectic blend of left and right policies." "[...] the mainstream right candidate François Fillon had nearly 20 percent, and the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon had 19.6 percent." As to why she is labeled "extreme", Wikipedia says: - She favours a "radical change of politics in order to drastically reduce upstream the influx of illegal immigrants towards France" - She supported a referendum on whether to reinstate capital punishment in France - "But I openly admit that, to some extent, I admire Vladimir Putin." - "I do not believe that there was an illegal annexation: there was a referendum, the citizens of Crimea wanted to join Russia." - Denouncing "the US supremacy", she "refused the idea that France slavishly followed the USA in this new stalemate"
sid-kap 9y ago
I know this is petty, but I kinda hope they build this on better technology than MediaWiki. MediaWiki has lots of annoying pitfalls. For example, there is no native support for threaded conversations. Also they have 2 or 3 different math syntaxes and no consensus on which one should be used where.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Why not improve MediaWiki instead?
  - spiderfarmer 9y ago
    Improvement means change. Change is scary and will break workflows. People will resist. I made big and small changes to a couple of online communities and believe me, the amount of vitriol you receive from people that are the masters of the domain they carved out for themselves will make you doubt every future decision. Even when it's objectively the right thing to do.
    - rocky1138 9y ago
      It reminds me a lot of the conundrum large companies have when faced with the prospect of disrupting their own cash cows.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Tried to make a donation. Hit the button and then got an endless "please wait" message. UPDATE: oh no I killed it.
- tmalsburg2 9y ago
  I managed to make a recurring donation after two attempts.
saurabhn 9y ago
What checks does the Wiki model offer against, say, a 4chan-style brigading? I love the idea, I just want it to be bulletproof too.
- tmalsburg2 9y ago
  Nothing is ever completely bulletproof. The real question is whether this is better than or a useful addition to the more traditional news media. I think there is a good chance that it will be.
- backpropaganda 9y ago
  The same wikipedia has. Algorithms to detect vandalism. People responsible for groups of pages. Wages of such people paid for by donations to ensure they don't yurn biased themselves.
- tnone 9y ago
  When has 4chan brigaded a wiki? To my knowledge, the only high profile brigading is when feminists go on their edit-a-thons to shift the bias in their direction.
jim-jim-jim 9y ago
The article in the dupe thread suggested that this would combat "fake news," but I dunno about that. I get the impression that people who digest biased/questionable sources do it to express tribal affiliation more than some genuine need to be informed. Hell, many people share articles without even reading them; they're primarily concerned with what the headline in their feed says about their character rather than the world at large. I'm not sure if having (another) "evidence based" outlet is going to be of any use to your cranky uncle. I think the real promise lies in Wikitribune potentially going toe-to-toe with "real news" like CNN or the Washington Post. These outlets also don't always get the facts straight and can't be said to have a diehard following. If a superior option presents itself, readers will follow.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  I tried to track down some of the crazy news stories that were being shared broadly on Facebook and much of what I found was that they were algorithmically generated titles slapped onto the same URL and the actual "story" was copied bits from other semi-related stories. You'd find really salacious headlines: "Hillary Clinton Murder Victim Speaks" and the actual story would be about her fundraising. They were arbitraging the cost of buying a FB ad (to drive traffic and start the viral loop) against how many ads they could run on the site.
- backpropaganda 9y ago
  Wikitribune IS going to go toe-to-toe against CNN and WP. It's proposing a new news model where you pay for news by donations.
  - jim-jim-jim 9y ago
    That's my impression as well. I was responding to an article title that has since been marked duplicate.
  - gotothedoctor 9y ago
    Wikitribune's professed goal to raise enough money to pay 10 print journalists. That seems like a big stretch?
aphextron 9y ago
I love the sentiment. But how does this differ from Wikinews? Is this not just arbitrarily passing the buck of "gatekeeper" to whatever people have enough free time to contribute?
- _rpd 9y ago
  This project will hire journalists who will write full time. The crowd is basically supposed to keep them honest - fact checking, criticizing tone, pointing out bias.
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  I'm amazed that Wikinews still exists, if only because it seems so incredibly unknown.
  - JdeBP 9y ago
    The amazing thing is that none of the BBC, The Financial Times, WiReD, or even The Register (whom one would think most likely to want to ask hard questions and not simply regurgitate the PR, given its coverage over the years) asked this, or even mentioned Wikinews. How does this relate to Wikinews, a crowd-sourced newspaper that actually is connected to Wikipedia and that has been trying to put into practice much of the model being put forward here for the past twelve years? is a fairly obvious question. No journalist covering this story apparently asked it.
remarkEon 9y ago
I understand what they're trying to do here, but beyond the problem of "fake news" there appears to be a deep crisis within the profession of Journalism itself. Wales is correct, in my opinion, that the proximate cause of this crisis is indeed social media. (If you don't agree just ask yourself how often you visit the masthead of whatever newspaper you typically read, and why that might be the case.) But I just don't see crowd-sourcing as the solution to this problem. I'm inclined to agree with @intended's diagnosis, and I feel like the solution has to come from the profession of Journalism itself. So, in attempt to not be "that guy" that just complains here's what I'd suggest as a start. - Institutions need to drop their relationship with Facebook et al (The Guardian has just done this [1]). - There's a few places (and in the interest of avoiding starting a flame war, I'll forgo naming them explicitly) that parade themselves as "objective" sources of news by telling you they're explaining "complicated" concepts in digestible ways. In my view, that's just a rhetorical tactic to disguise what is actually just advocacy journalism. It's not objective at all, and seeks to form your opinion rather than present you with data from which you form your own. These places need to either be shut down, or pivot back to what we'd traditionally consider actual reporting. - I consider myself reasonably well read, and read the actual, physical paper daily (when I can, I suppose). There is a distinct difference between the content I see pushed on the internet and what's in the traditional paper and it's this: increasingly articles that belong on the opinion pages are pushed elsewhere, probably because they know it'll generate more clicks elsewhere on the site because it makes either a controversial or marginally supported claim. In my view this directly contributes to the loss of faith people have in the Journalistic profession because it's just so damn easy to point out instances of bias. So, hire some old school editors and fire the "social media" guy and put content where it belongs. That's just what I can think of off the top of my head right now, but I'm pretty convinced that "crowd-sourcing" is not the answer to this problem. [1] http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news/ http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-ar...
- hackuser 9y ago
  > In my view this directly contributes to the loss of faith people have in the Journalistic profession I'd add that your second point also contributes to loss of faith: When propagandists call their publications journalism, and when other journalists treat them seriously, it brings down the credibility of all journalism. If any quack could call themself a heart surgeon then it would hurt the credibility of real heart surgeons. Also, when people see their side publishing propaganda, they assume that all journalism is propaganda: One side says this, the other says that, it's all the same (that thinking is an explicit goal of propaganda - not to persuade but to discredit everyone, leaving no source of truth). But it's not the same; truth has real meaning and value, an only liars say 'well, everyone lies'.
cwyers 9y ago
Wikipedia has pretty much ruined the encyclopedia by driving it down to the lowest common denominator. I look forward to them doing the same for news.
- cooper12 9y ago
  Except a Nature study comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica found them comparable in accuracy. [0] It's also funny that you think a lot of news hasn't already reached that point. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
soufron 9y ago
Lily Cole is an advisor against fake news?
- spearo77 9y ago
  I'd never heard of her, so I read about her on Wikipedia[0].. the impossible.com involvement seems relevant to this. [0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole#Business_activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole#Business_activities)
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    Somehow she managed to find time to get a double first from Cambridge whilst also being really pretty and an actress, so I think that probably at least slightly qualifies her for some vague element of credibility.
    - hartsdown 9y ago
      Since 'History is a Myth' and she has a double 1st in Art History then I guess she is qualified
empressplay 9y ago
It concerns me that they don't know the difference between 'lead' and 'led'. Otherwise I love the idea that there must be an attributable source to all information they present -- no more "senior government officials" or "anonymous FBI agents"...
- carlmungz 9y ago
  Sometimes anonymous sources are the only way you can cover a story. For example, during my time as a local journalist I regularly had former and current employees of my local council leak information to me. But I couldn't name them so I would refer to them as 'senior council officials' or 'council insiders'.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > Sometimes anonymous sources are the only way you can cover a story Then don't. Source won't go on record? Then they aren't a source.
    - carlmungz 9y ago
      That's not how it always works. I once had a source come to me with information about how families were being shipped in to my town from another city because the housing crisis affecting the UK meant local councils could not house residents locally. In another case, I was given salary details for council employees who were being paid in a similar manner to this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/nhs-chief-on-record-60000-a-month-as-numbers-off-payroll-soar/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/nhs-chief-on-reco.... In one other case a council employee told me how morale was low in the council's social services department due to pressure from senior officials and the workload. The source said there were concerns over how this was affecting the welfare of the children they were meant to look after. In all three cases the stories checked out and in the published story I wrote that the initial information came from an unnamed source. In the housing case I was able to speak to some of the families and they went on record. In the payroll case I published the salaries and the council did not say my information was false. In the social services case they gave us a statement. The problem with using anonymous sources comes when journalists use them as an excuse for publishing unverified information. If my sources had gone on record they would have most likely have lost their jobs meaning future whistle-blowers/sources would not have spoken to me or would have not spoken to other journalists in the future. If that happens how can institutions and individuals be held to account?
krmbzds 9y ago
I would support it if it weren't down.
- feliceme 9y ago
  It up now and the "become a supporter" section seems to work again.
rodionos 9y ago
If this ends up being the same as data journalism, it would be great. - http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail - home of ... data journalism - https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892 https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892 - seeking a ... data journalist - https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips - ... is a data reporter
barking 9y ago
This reminds me of the famous Huey Long quote: "One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government - and they aren't going to like it." If there ever is a 'paper' that publishes the full unvarnished un-redacted truth about everything, it will have very many enemies, some of them very powerful.
Animats 9y ago
So this is a for-profit operation where volunteers do the work? The site is vague about such details. "People like you helping people like us help ourselves?" Not good. You can be a for-profit or a non-profit, but pretending to be a non-profit when you're not is deceptive. Their terms of use are awful.[1] Note that they want to operate under British law, where libel law favors the subject. They have an indemnification clause, so their volunteers could be compelled to reimburse WikiTribune if WikiTribune loses a libel suit. That's happened in the UK; see the famous McLibel case, where McDonalds sued two Greenpeace volunteers. That decision was overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. But, post-Brexit, that level of appeal will no longer be available. They also appear to have plagiarized the terms of use from other sites. One section reads "We may, in our sole discretion, limit or cancel quantities purchased per person, per household or per order. ... We reserve the right to limit or prohibit orders that, in our sole judgment, appear to be placed by dealers, resellers or distributors." That exact text appears on other sites, usually ones that sell tangible goods. It's completely inappropriate here. Sloppy. This stuff matters when the business involves pissing people off. Don't volunteer to write for this organization unless and until they work out the liability issue. [1] https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/ https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case
- derriz 9y ago
  Small point of information: the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution and so will remain available to UK citizens after Brexit.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    He probably confused it with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
  - kitd 9y ago
    You are technically correct, but the ruling Conservatives have stated they intend to withdraw anyway after Brexit.
redsummer 9y ago
Wikipedia was the original fake news. For instance, someone might edit an article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the plughole. The entropic heat death of information. I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are now disasters. Full of bowdlerisation, inconsistent style, and false snippets of information. I think the abusive nature of many Wikipedia admins, and the hostility of Wikipedia itself to knowledge, will eventually just make it a 4chan with pretentions.
RandyRanderson 9y ago
Are the facts more important or are the topics? For example, the NYT is generally pretty factual however IMO the topics they select and placement in the periodical are the message. So the fact that they write front page article on some terrorist attack in say France that kills 5 while a similar drone strike on the same day in Afganistan kills 20 and gets buried on page 30 is the point. Who was is that once said the first casualty in any war is truth? And how many blows did we miss that lead to that first casualty? Regardless, I see little downside to this and hope it's successful!
- agumonkey 9y ago
  "We know exactly everything about nothing that matters" 2017
- abyssin 9y ago
  This is the root question. The discussion around fake news often touches the subject of press neutrality. Some will say mainstream press is biased and has an agenda, so-called mainstream will answer by proposing more fact-checking. However, truth and neutrality are situated in different dimensions. It seems to be relatively easy to avoid spreading lies for those who want to. Providing neutral news is an entirely different type of problem. Addressing the critics made to the press by promising fact-checked news might be perceived as only one more manifestation of unjust discretionary power of the press to determine what can be said. Is striving for neutrality something the press should do? Or should it work on clarifying how biased it is, and why?
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    Its easy to use real facts to lie. This is IMO the MSM approach to fake news.
  - _jal 9y ago
    The first thing to do is get the press to admit bias. Bias is fine. Everyone is biased. Journalism in other countries works fine with admission of opinions. Just own your own viewpoints and quit pretending to be some neutral third party. The important thing is to take the fiction off the table. "Of course we sound like marginally liberal establishment-supporters - we're the NYT." "Naturally we support the revanchists - we're Fox." (See? My bias is up front.)
lr4444lr 9y ago
Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring that that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify This is hardly the only source of bias in the news, which is an age-old problem. We'd be better off just expecting news organizations to announce their bias up front so that we don't have to read between the lines in order to ferret out its nuances.
- dagw 9y ago
  Also 'verify' doesn't mean much. Even flat earthers can verify everything they believe in.
  - spiderfarmer 9y ago
    No. That's not 'verifying' at all. They are dismissing facts and make it all come down to something you have to 'believe'. Religion works the same way.
    - Neliquat 9y ago
      I know a christian biologist that steadfastly refuses to belive in any type of evolution. We talked for hours about it, and he is convinced he is intellectually correct. Never underestimate cognative dissonance.
- notahacker 9y ago
  It's also unclear what he means by "facts they can verify" Wales founded an encyclopedia on the basis that everything had to be "verified" by linking to a "secondary source", which in the case of recent events generally meant linking to a news report by a "reliable" subset of the same media Wikitribune aims to compete with. The other alternative, of course, is to link purely to primary sources like Open Data, online video and public figures' Twitter feeds for recording the fact they made an announcement. Wikipedia tended to frown on such behaviour largely because a "WP:SYNTH" policy recognised that stringing together multiple facts often implied decidedly non-factual conclusions (and if no other reliable source had drawn together those facts then it probably wasn't important and quite possibly wasn't a valid inference to be drawing). And whilst "X responded that" is certainly a fact, whether X's statement can reasonably be interpreted as accurate is generally a matter of opinion. Unqualified reporting of "X said $contentiousclaims" because they can't be conclusively established as non-factual is itself an editorial stance. Most news media doesn't exactly hide its biases though (and the worst news media for factual accuracy tends to be the most explicit about declaring it)
dev_head_up 9y ago
> WikiTribune is 100% ad-free, no one’s relying on clicks to appease advertisers; no one’s got a vested interest in anything other than giving you real news. Ha! Oh c'mon, anyone who's experienced the activistism of certain groups on Wikipedia knows there's plenty of people with a vested interest in this kind of thing.
spiderfarmer 9y ago
This is almost exactly what "De Correspondent"[1] in The Netherlands strives to be, with regards to ads, open data and relying on experts among their readers. They announced that they'll open source their CMS but it's not available yet. Too bad really. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent
- stuffchunk 9y ago
  They are also working on an international version of their platform: https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/
  - zigzigzag 9y ago
    Hmmmm. That website is ... unconvincing. At best. The heart of De Correspondent is our founding document from 2013 – a manifesto of sorts – and these core principles have informed how we’ve built De Correspondent ... 1. De Correspondent provides an antidote to the daily news grind. 2. De Correspondent challenges oversimplification and stereotyping. Here are the top four headlines from the "selected stories from our archives" section on the front page: "This is how we can fight Donald Trump’s attack on democracy" "If Shell knew climate change was dire 25 years ago, why still business as usual today?" "We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump" "How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry" These headlines read exactly like a typical front page of the Guardian. How is this "challenging oversimplification" or being "an antidote to the daily news grind"? I can find content like that anywhere on the internet for free, its value is literally zero. The Manifesto itself does not seem very consistent. It says things like: Correspondents are fair and independent, yet also explicitly subjective and De Correspondent is ambitious in its ideals, yet modest in its claims after making a series of decidedly not modest claims. It also has this amusing statement: Although De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, we do not strive to maximize profits for shareholders. A profit ceiling has been stipulated in our statutes: Any profit distribution may not be greater than 5% of revenues. But 20 seconds googling throws up a claim that the average profit margin in the newspaper industry is around 3.2%, which sounds about right. Average profit margins across all industries are 10% but the news industry is famously in decline and laying off employees, so 10% would be far too high. Aiming for 5% profit margins as if it's some great sacrifice indicates that either they believe their readers don't know much about business, or they themselves don't know. Neither possibility makes me want to subscribe.
kristianc 9y ago
This feels like Vox - another attempt to 'explain the news', or 'provide more context'. The fundamental problem that these sites run into is a thorough understanding of issues in the news requires context, and very often not the kind of context that can fit into an 800 word blog post on a subject. An 800 word blog or article of any sort necessitates that you're going to make choices about which evidence you're going to include, which sources are credible and which sources are not, which sources add to the discussion vs which only serve to obscure. As soon as you do that, you're adding bias. You can set out to build an 'evidence based' news site, but what you quickly find is that you've built a site with paid journalists (who have their own biases) supported by volunteers (who are the people most likely to have political skin in the game). The problem is that people want a shortcut for everything - they want an 800 word post that will tell them everything they need to know about Syria. No such thing exists. There's no substitute for actually putting in the work and navigating the bias yourself.
anothercomment 9y ago
All these efforts have the same issue that existing media outlets have: why should they be more trustworthy than the existing media? All the newspapers in existence already claim that their number #1 goal is to report the truth. We all know they tend to fail miserably.
- tmalsburg2 9y ago
  That's actually explained in the video. Wales says that news media don't have the resources to produce high-quality output because the competition for clicks is so fierce. WikiTribune addresses this in two ways: First, they don't participate in said competition for clicks because they won't run on ads but donations. In other words, their customer is the reader who has an interest in quality. Second, they recruit citizen journalists who can help produce articles that a traditional news business would not be able to afford. Just paraphrasing. Watch the video.
  - anothercomment 9y ago
    I don't think money is the issue. Journalists have their own agenda and tweak and omit accordingly.
    - trendoid 9y ago
      There is barely any human on this planet without an agenda. Not sure what your point is. Is it that we should stop trying new experiments with news because some humans are involved?
      - anothercomment 9y ago
        No, they shouldn't claim they are better and have no agenda. My point is these projects are bound to fail. Of course they will be "helpful" to some - after all, everybody picks some sources they trust. So if you feel you can trust the WikiThingie, then I guess it is helpful to you. Just don't make any glorious claims about beating fake news.
mcculley 9y ago
I was excited to read the announcement. Then I discovered it is not really ready to go. This gives me the impression that it is half baked. That's really not the impression they should be making with something so important. I tried to register as a supporter. Upon submitting my credit card, I got a CloudFlare error. I have no idea what was supposed to happen when I registered. When I received the confirmation email, I clicked the "confirm" button, was asked to prove I was human by identifying photos of gas stations, then taken to the website of impossible.com instead of WikiTribune.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hartsdown 9y ago
My BS detector tells me WikiTribune will fail but will collect lots of money from gullible CrowdFunders. Sorry, no evidence to justify that conclusion apart from the fact that at the moment it's a bit like watching a video of some device floating in a river that somehow against the law of physics is going to power a small village :-)
hartsdown 9y ago
My BS detector tells me WikiTribune will fail but will collect lots of money from gullible CrowdFunders. Sorry, no evidence to justify that conclusion apart from the fact that at the moment it's a bit like watching a video of some device floating in a river that somehow against the law of physics is going to power a small village :-)
fs111 9y ago
How is a 28 year old fashion model exactly going to advise them on anything related to journalism?
- tentacule 9y ago
  On the bottom right side of the page you can see "Powered by Impossible" which is her website.
davidlago 9y ago
Anybody else getting stuck after the payment screen? I ended up getting a cloudflare error...
andrewla 9y ago
I'm interested to see how this project evolves. As it is, even before all the furor about "fake news", I found myself consistently using Wikipedia to get summary and background information about ongoing news events, where mainstream news sources would present new data without any context and deliberately avoiding showing information about primary sources where available in favor of more internal links to other stories that give a glimpse of the point-in-time view of an ongoing story. This is even more pronounced for retrospective coverage, where developments in the story as it had evolved are hard to glean from the coverage at the time, but important facts are surfaced throughout the coverage that are often elided in a retrospective published by a news source, but are well-represented, even controversially (where facts disagree or question the overall narrative). My main complaint about the current trend in journalism (under Trump) is that the desire to sell clicks is so strong that you get no idea whether anything that happens is highly unusual or just routine, but the negative spin is so heavy that I can no longer trust that I'm being told how unusual each event is unless I really dig into it to find out. A great example is the ongoing harassment of international travelers in the US. The impression I get is that things have gotten much worse, but there's certainly ample evidence of unpleasant behavior even under previous administrations, and some slim cherry-picked data saying that it's gotten worse. This is clearly a space where better sourcing of primary sources would help to make things a lot clearer, and to an extent, a somewhat adversarial approach to news research would help to reduce the tendency towards alarmism.
dayaz36 9y ago
The premise that the news was truthful before the internet and we need to go back to having gatekeepers is comical
Thekohser 9y ago
Does anyone here remember Jimbo's earlier big "charity" venture -- CiviliNation? Jimbo was very recently on Reddit, trying to drum up donations for Wikitribune. It was asked, how will Wikitribune be different than the CiviliNation.org non-profit that Jimmy set up with his gal-pal Andrea Weckerle? Wales replied that since he was the "primary funder" of CiviliNation, the argument that it had bilked donors of money was moot in his mind. Let's see: CiviliNation's Form 990s from 2010-2014 total $82,428 in contributions. If Jimbo was the "primary funder", that's at least $41,215. So he attests that he donated over $41K to CiviliNation -- while Weckerle took $63,228 in salary, on total contributions of $82,428. Meaning, he basically bankrolled most of his girlfriend Andrea Weckerle's personal income from CiviliNation, which accomplished what? CiviliNation.org is barely a functioning website any more; its blog was last updated 13 months ago. Wales was so charitably inept that he forked over $41K to a failed attempt to "fix" online civility that ultimately accomplished not much more than keeping his girlfriend in food, clothes, and shelter for a few years, with tax-deductible dollars. Based on my observation of Jimmy Wales and Openserving, Wikia Search, CiviliNation, Impossible, and The People's Operator, I would say an easy case could be made that the man specializes in grifting and fraud.

462 points by spearo77 9y ago

Seems to be overloaded right now, but I found their campaign video via search in Vimeo https://vimeo.com/214586867 https://vimeo.com/214586867

lips 9y ago

Am I just daft or do I not see any sort of workflow described? Do I need to watch the video?

eddieh 9y ago

If only it would load again (too much traffic I presume). I'm prepared to fork over some serious cash.

RhysU 9y ago

Seems like a great way to cite secondary sources. How does this model work for a primary source?

killjoywashere 9y ago

I tried to donate and got a 503 after inputting my credit card. Guess I'll wait for that to settle out for a while...

xur17 9y ago
Ran into the same issue. I received a purchase notification from my credit card, but now I don't know if I donated or not...
NovaS1X 9y ago
Same issue, but I got through and got a receipt for my sub and donation. Just keep trying. It seems to be up at this moment.

gkoberger 9y ago

Site's down, but here's an article about it: http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-launches-wikitribune-news-by-the-people-and-for-the-people/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wal...

spullara 9y ago

Wow. What a terrible start. I'd expect something a little more robust given the obvious attention it would attract.

resist_futility 9y ago

Anyone know why this is an independent project instead of being part the Wikimedia foundation?

rand005 9y ago
> Wales, who sits on the board of Guardian Media Group, the Guardian’s parent company, founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, before donating the entire project to a non-profit organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, that he set up in 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-to-fight-fake-news-with-new-wikitribune-site https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia...
abdias 9y ago
Yes, YOU, and me. We can all do our own research to discern what is fake or not.

alva 9y ago

"Facts can be presented with bias, taken out of context and most recently a lot of facts are just plain…made-up. Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring that that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify." Honourable aims for this project, however once you are literally only reporting the presented facts (without bias - aka opinion) surely you are just a Wire Service?

splawn 9y ago
we need more "just a wire service" please
- alva 9y ago
  absolutely. it is just that WikiTribune is not presenting itself that way at all
tmalsburg2 9y ago
Are you saying that news media aren't doing more than just adding opinion to facts? Opinion does play a role but the main function and purpose of news media is to contextualize facts which would be useless when presented out of context. This process may introduce some bias but it doesn't have to.

known 9y ago

truth != fact

peshkira 9y ago
example?
hartsdown 9y ago
It's a fact that 100% of the people I recently surveyed said that the Moon was made of green cheese - I only asked my 6 year-old grand-daughter :-)

anigbrowl 9y ago

Has potential, as a news junkie I'm interested in both using and contributing to this. Heaven knows internet news delivery needs an overhaul. Google could have solved his problem years ago but have instead chosen to profit off it.

dmos62 9y ago
How could Google solve this? I'm genuinely interested in what you have to say.

intended 9y ago

Reinventing the wheel, or in this case, reinventing the square wheel. Wikitribune solves a problem, just not the problem they have defined as the target. They've used a naive view of the problem; the model under this ignores the existence of antagonists and too much faith in crowd sourcing difficult problems. Antagonists will prey on services like this, and off the top of my head, here's 2 ways in which such a service can be made biased. 1) baseless accusations, oft repeated. Find the facts inimical to your (the antagonists) position. Ignore them. Find facts which are borderline, and have dog whistle properties - highlight these facts ad nauseum. Say that "Wikitribune is biased". Repeat till it sticks. Then target the facts inimical to you. 2) flood the service with facts that serve your cause- humans have only so much working memory. ---- The particular structure wikitribune has chosen, will result in issues. There's a reason print news papers had an editor and a whole staff dedicated to working together. With volunteers there's no structure, and that causes failures, just consider the Boston bomber case. Of course with a journalist in the mix the assumption is that they will push back. But the structure is supposedly egalitarian, which just means that this is going to end up causing the same politicking, and admin arguing that plagues Wikipedia. Recruit everyone, don't get volunteers. Get the whole team. > Articles are authored, fact-checked, and verified by professional journalists and community members working side by side as equals, and supported not primarily by advertisers, but by readers who care about good journalism enough to become monthly supporters The wisdom of the crowd fails all too often. As another article recently discussed, it's 5% of the people that take up most of your time. How will this structure deal with truly divisive news articles? Or people who have conflicts (and conflicts of interest) within the group? How will you deal with the fact that one day someone can say "volunteer X was a pedophile from <country>!" Kudos for trying it. This looks like a propaganda machine which will use the wiki brand about to be born.

NovaS1X 9y ago
I'd rather give this a shot than just shut it down with the cynical negativity that we oft see on HN. There are obvious faults like you have pointed out, but we have to try something to get us out of the the situation we're in. This is the first honest effort I've seen that has some credibility.

clarkmoody 9y ago

I love the idea of trying a new business model for news delivery, especially one centered around facts. I seriously hope this project can overcome the prevalent, subtle biases in media. For instance, every single headline from the recent French election mentioned "far-right" Le Pen without also mentioning any ideological affiliation of the other candidates. Painting your opponent as an extremist is an effective political tactic, and "far-right" certainly sounds extreme. Were most media outlets opposed to Le Pen, hence the extreme label? Why not label any other candidates? I'm not necessarily optimistic about the prospects for unbiased news, but I will be watching this project as it progresses.

r00fus 9y ago
They also called Mélanchon "far-left"...
- jvzr 9y ago
  Well, Mélenchon is far-left. Left is Parti Socialiste. Right is Les Républicains. Far-right is Front National. These are the French definitions of Left and Right, and probably have nothing to do with other countries'. Based on these definitions, the Democrats are Right and Republicans are Far-right. Whether they are good definitions, I can't say. But Mélenchon is definitely not plain Left, or Center.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Sounds a bit rhetorical. How information is "far-right" and "far-left"? Not much other than to expose a fallacious single-dimension scale. How about terms like "left-socialist" or "right-nationalist"?
matt4077 9y ago
They call her "far-right" because that's what she is. The party is called "Front National", after all – "Front" as in war. They don't mind the label. It's simply a description of fact, with the possible caveat that some of their economic ideas aren't that different from those on the far left. The media also regularly labels the other candidates, and nobody is complaining about them any more than Clinton complained when someone said she was left of Trump, politically. Example from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen-france-election.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/europe/emmanuel-mac... "[...]Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to go to a runoff to determine the next president, official returns showed. One is a political novice, the other a far-right firebrand " "Mr. Macron, a former investment banker, abandoned traditional parties a year ago to form his own movement with an eclectic blend of left and right policies." "[...] the mainstream right candidate François Fillon had nearly 20 percent, and the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon had 19.6 percent." As to why she is labeled "extreme", Wikipedia says: - She favours a "radical change of politics in order to drastically reduce upstream the influx of illegal immigrants towards France" - She supported a referendum on whether to reinstate capital punishment in France - "But I openly admit that, to some extent, I admire Vladimir Putin." - "I do not believe that there was an illegal annexation: there was a referendum, the citizens of Crimea wanted to join Russia." - Denouncing "the US supremacy", she "refused the idea that France slavishly followed the USA in this new stalemate"

sid-kap 9y ago

I know this is petty, but I kinda hope they build this on better technology than MediaWiki. MediaWiki has lots of annoying pitfalls. For example, there is no native support for threaded conversations. Also they have 2 or 3 different math syntaxes and no consensus on which one should be used where.

rocky1138 9y ago
Why not improve MediaWiki instead?
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  Improvement means change. Change is scary and will break workflows. People will resist. I made big and small changes to a couple of online communities and believe me, the amount of vitriol you receive from people that are the masters of the domain they carved out for themselves will make you doubt every future decision. Even when it's objectively the right thing to do.
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    It reminds me a lot of the conundrum large companies have when faced with the prospect of disrupting their own cash cows.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

Tried to make a donation. Hit the button and then got an endless "please wait" message. UPDATE: oh no I killed it.

tmalsburg2 9y ago
I managed to make a recurring donation after two attempts.

saurabhn 9y ago

What checks does the Wiki model offer against, say, a 4chan-style brigading? I love the idea, I just want it to be bulletproof too.

tmalsburg2 9y ago
Nothing is ever completely bulletproof. The real question is whether this is better than or a useful addition to the more traditional news media. I think there is a good chance that it will be.
backpropaganda 9y ago
The same wikipedia has. Algorithms to detect vandalism. People responsible for groups of pages. Wages of such people paid for by donations to ensure they don't yurn biased themselves.
tnone 9y ago
When has 4chan brigaded a wiki? To my knowledge, the only high profile brigading is when feminists go on their edit-a-thons to shift the bias in their direction.

jim-jim-jim 9y ago

The article in the dupe thread suggested that this would combat "fake news," but I dunno about that. I get the impression that people who digest biased/questionable sources do it to express tribal affiliation more than some genuine need to be informed. Hell, many people share articles without even reading them; they're primarily concerned with what the headline in their feed says about their character rather than the world at large. I'm not sure if having (another) "evidence based" outlet is going to be of any use to your cranky uncle. I think the real promise lies in Wikitribune potentially going toe-to-toe with "real news" like CNN or the Washington Post. These outlets also don't always get the facts straight and can't be said to have a diehard following. If a superior option presents itself, readers will follow.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago
I tried to track down some of the crazy news stories that were being shared broadly on Facebook and much of what I found was that they were algorithmically generated titles slapped onto the same URL and the actual "story" was copied bits from other semi-related stories. You'd find really salacious headlines: "Hillary Clinton Murder Victim Speaks" and the actual story would be about her fundraising. They were arbitraging the cost of buying a FB ad (to drive traffic and start the viral loop) against how many ads they could run on the site.
backpropaganda 9y ago
Wikitribune IS going to go toe-to-toe against CNN and WP. It's proposing a new news model where you pay for news by donations.
- jim-jim-jim 9y ago
  That's my impression as well. I was responding to an article title that has since been marked duplicate.
- gotothedoctor 9y ago
  Wikitribune's professed goal to raise enough money to pay 10 print journalists. That seems like a big stretch?

aphextron 9y ago

I love the sentiment. But how does this differ from Wikinews? Is this not just arbitrarily passing the buck of "gatekeeper" to whatever people have enough free time to contribute?

_rpd 9y ago
This project will hire journalists who will write full time. The crowd is basically supposed to keep them honest - fact checking, criticizing tone, pointing out bias.
LeoPanthera 9y ago
I'm amazed that Wikinews still exists, if only because it seems so incredibly unknown.
- JdeBP 9y ago
  The amazing thing is that none of the BBC, The Financial Times, WiReD, or even The Register (whom one would think most likely to want to ask hard questions and not simply regurgitate the PR, given its coverage over the years) asked this, or even mentioned Wikinews. How does this relate to Wikinews, a crowd-sourced newspaper that actually is connected to Wikipedia and that has been trying to put into practice much of the model being put forward here for the past twelve years? is a fairly obvious question. No journalist covering this story apparently asked it.

remarkEon 9y ago

I understand what they're trying to do here, but beyond the problem of "fake news" there appears to be a deep crisis within the profession of Journalism itself. Wales is correct, in my opinion, that the proximate cause of this crisis is indeed social media. (If you don't agree just ask yourself how often you visit the masthead of whatever newspaper you typically read, and why that might be the case.) But I just don't see crowd-sourcing as the solution to this problem. I'm inclined to agree with @intended's diagnosis, and I feel like the solution has to come from the profession of Journalism itself. So, in attempt to not be "that guy" that just complains here's what I'd suggest as a start. - Institutions need to drop their relationship with Facebook et al (The Guardian has just done this [1]). - There's a few places (and in the interest of avoiding starting a flame war, I'll forgo naming them explicitly) that parade themselves as "objective" sources of news by telling you they're explaining "complicated" concepts in digestible ways. In my view, that's just a rhetorical tactic to disguise what is actually just advocacy journalism. It's not objective at all, and seeks to form your opinion rather than present you with data from which you form your own. These places need to either be shut down, or pivot back to what we'd traditionally consider actual reporting. - I consider myself reasonably well read, and read the actual, physical paper daily (when I can, I suppose). There is a distinct difference between the content I see pushed on the internet and what's in the traditional paper and it's this: increasingly articles that belong on the opinion pages are pushed elsewhere, probably because they know it'll generate more clicks elsewhere on the site because it makes either a controversial or marginally supported claim. In my view this directly contributes to the loss of faith people have in the Journalistic profession because it's just so damn easy to point out instances of bias. So, hire some old school editors and fire the "social media" guy and put content where it belongs. That's just what I can think of off the top of my head right now, but I'm pretty convinced that "crowd-sourcing" is not the answer to this problem. [1] http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news/ http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-ar...

hackuser 9y ago
> In my view this directly contributes to the loss of faith people have in the Journalistic profession I'd add that your second point also contributes to loss of faith: When propagandists call their publications journalism, and when other journalists treat them seriously, it brings down the credibility of all journalism. If any quack could call themself a heart surgeon then it would hurt the credibility of real heart surgeons. Also, when people see their side publishing propaganda, they assume that all journalism is propaganda: One side says this, the other says that, it's all the same (that thinking is an explicit goal of propaganda - not to persuade but to discredit everyone, leaving no source of truth). But it's not the same; truth has real meaning and value, an only liars say 'well, everyone lies'.

cwyers 9y ago

Wikipedia has pretty much ruined the encyclopedia by driving it down to the lowest common denominator. I look forward to them doing the same for news.

cooper12 9y ago
Except a Nature study comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica found them comparable in accuracy. [0] It's also funny that you think a lot of news hasn't already reached that point. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

soufron 9y ago

Lily Cole is an advisor against fake news?

spearo77 9y ago
I'd never heard of her, so I read about her on Wikipedia[0].. the impossible.com involvement seems relevant to this. [0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole#Business_activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole#Business_activities)
- bshimmin 9y ago
  Somehow she managed to find time to get a double first from Cambridge whilst also being really pretty and an actress, so I think that probably at least slightly qualifies her for some vague element of credibility.
  - hartsdown 9y ago
    Since 'History is a Myth' and she has a double 1st in Art History then I guess she is qualified

empressplay 9y ago

It concerns me that they don't know the difference between 'lead' and 'led'. Otherwise I love the idea that there must be an attributable source to all information they present -- no more "senior government officials" or "anonymous FBI agents"...

carlmungz 9y ago
Sometimes anonymous sources are the only way you can cover a story. For example, during my time as a local journalist I regularly had former and current employees of my local council leak information to me. But I couldn't name them so I would refer to them as 'senior council officials' or 'council insiders'.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > Sometimes anonymous sources are the only way you can cover a story Then don't. Source won't go on record? Then they aren't a source.
  - carlmungz 9y ago
    That's not how it always works. I once had a source come to me with information about how families were being shipped in to my town from another city because the housing crisis affecting the UK meant local councils could not house residents locally. In another case, I was given salary details for council employees who were being paid in a similar manner to this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/nhs-chief-on-record-60000-a-month-as-numbers-off-payroll-soar/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/nhs-chief-on-reco.... In one other case a council employee told me how morale was low in the council's social services department due to pressure from senior officials and the workload. The source said there were concerns over how this was affecting the welfare of the children they were meant to look after. In all three cases the stories checked out and in the published story I wrote that the initial information came from an unnamed source. In the housing case I was able to speak to some of the families and they went on record. In the payroll case I published the salaries and the council did not say my information was false. In the social services case they gave us a statement. The problem with using anonymous sources comes when journalists use them as an excuse for publishing unverified information. If my sources had gone on record they would have most likely have lost their jobs meaning future whistle-blowers/sources would not have spoken to me or would have not spoken to other journalists in the future. If that happens how can institutions and individuals be held to account?

krmbzds 9y ago

I would support it if it weren't down.

feliceme 9y ago
It up now and the "become a supporter" section seems to work again.

rodionos 9y ago

If this ends up being the same as data journalism, it would be great. - http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail - home of ... data journalism - https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892 https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892 - seeking a ... data journalist - https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips - ... is a data reporter

barking 9y ago

This reminds me of the famous Huey Long quote: "One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government - and they aren't going to like it." If there ever is a 'paper' that publishes the full unvarnished un-redacted truth about everything, it will have very many enemies, some of them very powerful.

Animats 9y ago

So this is a for-profit operation where volunteers do the work? The site is vague about such details. "People like you helping people like us help ourselves?" Not good. You can be a for-profit or a non-profit, but pretending to be a non-profit when you're not is deceptive. Their terms of use are awful.[1] Note that they want to operate under British law, where libel law favors the subject. They have an indemnification clause, so their volunteers could be compelled to reimburse WikiTribune if WikiTribune loses a libel suit. That's happened in the UK; see the famous McLibel case, where McDonalds sued two Greenpeace volunteers. That decision was overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. But, post-Brexit, that level of appeal will no longer be available. They also appear to have plagiarized the terms of use from other sites. One section reads "We may, in our sole discretion, limit or cancel quantities purchased per person, per household or per order. ... We reserve the right to limit or prohibit orders that, in our sole judgment, appear to be placed by dealers, resellers or distributors." That exact text appears on other sites, usually ones that sell tangible goods. It's completely inappropriate here. Sloppy. This stuff matters when the business involves pissing people off. Don't volunteer to write for this organization unless and until they work out the liability issue. [1] https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/ https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case

derriz 9y ago
Small point of information: the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution and so will remain available to UK citizens after Brexit.
- mtgx 9y ago
  He probably confused it with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
- kitd 9y ago
  You are technically correct, but the ruling Conservatives have stated they intend to withdraw anyway after Brexit.

redsummer 9y ago

Wikipedia was the original fake news. For instance, someone might edit an article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the plughole. The entropic heat death of information. I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are now disasters. Full of bowdlerisation, inconsistent style, and false snippets of information. I think the abusive nature of many Wikipedia admins, and the hostility of Wikipedia itself to knowledge, will eventually just make it a 4chan with pretentions.

RandyRanderson 9y ago

Are the facts more important or are the topics? For example, the NYT is generally pretty factual however IMO the topics they select and placement in the periodical are the message. So the fact that they write front page article on some terrorist attack in say France that kills 5 while a similar drone strike on the same day in Afganistan kills 20 and gets buried on page 30 is the point. Who was is that once said the first casualty in any war is truth? And how many blows did we miss that lead to that first casualty? Regardless, I see little downside to this and hope it's successful!

agumonkey 9y ago
"We know exactly everything about nothing that matters" 2017
abyssin 9y ago
This is the root question. The discussion around fake news often touches the subject of press neutrality. Some will say mainstream press is biased and has an agenda, so-called mainstream will answer by proposing more fact-checking. However, truth and neutrality are situated in different dimensions. It seems to be relatively easy to avoid spreading lies for those who want to. Providing neutral news is an entirely different type of problem. Addressing the critics made to the press by promising fact-checked news might be perceived as only one more manifestation of unjust discretionary power of the press to determine what can be said. Is striving for neutrality something the press should do? Or should it work on clarifying how biased it is, and why?
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  Its easy to use real facts to lie. This is IMO the MSM approach to fake news.
- _jal 9y ago
  The first thing to do is get the press to admit bias. Bias is fine. Everyone is biased. Journalism in other countries works fine with admission of opinions. Just own your own viewpoints and quit pretending to be some neutral third party. The important thing is to take the fiction off the table. "Of course we sound like marginally liberal establishment-supporters - we're the NYT." "Naturally we support the revanchists - we're Fox." (See? My bias is up front.)

lr4444lr 9y ago

Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring that that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify This is hardly the only source of bias in the news, which is an age-old problem. We'd be better off just expecting news organizations to announce their bias up front so that we don't have to read between the lines in order to ferret out its nuances.

dagw 9y ago
Also 'verify' doesn't mean much. Even flat earthers can verify everything they believe in.
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  No. That's not 'verifying' at all. They are dismissing facts and make it all come down to something you have to 'believe'. Religion works the same way.
  - Neliquat 9y ago
    I know a christian biologist that steadfastly refuses to belive in any type of evolution. We talked for hours about it, and he is convinced he is intellectually correct. Never underestimate cognative dissonance.
notahacker 9y ago
It's also unclear what he means by "facts they can verify" Wales founded an encyclopedia on the basis that everything had to be "verified" by linking to a "secondary source", which in the case of recent events generally meant linking to a news report by a "reliable" subset of the same media Wikitribune aims to compete with. The other alternative, of course, is to link purely to primary sources like Open Data, online video and public figures' Twitter feeds for recording the fact they made an announcement. Wikipedia tended to frown on such behaviour largely because a "WP:SYNTH" policy recognised that stringing together multiple facts often implied decidedly non-factual conclusions (and if no other reliable source had drawn together those facts then it probably wasn't important and quite possibly wasn't a valid inference to be drawing). And whilst "X responded that" is certainly a fact, whether X's statement can reasonably be interpreted as accurate is generally a matter of opinion. Unqualified reporting of "X said $contentiousclaims" because they can't be conclusively established as non-factual is itself an editorial stance. Most news media doesn't exactly hide its biases though (and the worst news media for factual accuracy tends to be the most explicit about declaring it)

dev_head_up 9y ago

> WikiTribune is 100% ad-free, no one’s relying on clicks to appease advertisers; no one’s got a vested interest in anything other than giving you real news. Ha! Oh c'mon, anyone who's experienced the activistism of certain groups on Wikipedia knows there's plenty of people with a vested interest in this kind of thing.

spiderfarmer 9y ago

This is almost exactly what "De Correspondent"[1] in The Netherlands strives to be, with regards to ads, open data and relying on experts among their readers. They announced that they'll open source their CMS but it's not available yet. Too bad really. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent

stuffchunk 9y ago
They are also working on an international version of their platform: https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/
- zigzigzag 9y ago
  Hmmmm. That website is ... unconvincing. At best. The heart of De Correspondent is our founding document from 2013 – a manifesto of sorts – and these core principles have informed how we’ve built De Correspondent ... 1. De Correspondent provides an antidote to the daily news grind. 2. De Correspondent challenges oversimplification and stereotyping. Here are the top four headlines from the "selected stories from our archives" section on the front page: "This is how we can fight Donald Trump’s attack on democracy" "If Shell knew climate change was dire 25 years ago, why still business as usual today?" "We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump" "How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry" These headlines read exactly like a typical front page of the Guardian. How is this "challenging oversimplification" or being "an antidote to the daily news grind"? I can find content like that anywhere on the internet for free, its value is literally zero. The Manifesto itself does not seem very consistent. It says things like: Correspondents are fair and independent, yet also explicitly subjective and De Correspondent is ambitious in its ideals, yet modest in its claims after making a series of decidedly not modest claims. It also has this amusing statement: Although De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, we do not strive to maximize profits for shareholders. A profit ceiling has been stipulated in our statutes: Any profit distribution may not be greater than 5% of revenues. But 20 seconds googling throws up a claim that the average profit margin in the newspaper industry is around 3.2%, which sounds about right. Average profit margins across all industries are 10% but the news industry is famously in decline and laying off employees, so 10% would be far too high. Aiming for 5% profit margins as if it's some great sacrifice indicates that either they believe their readers don't know much about business, or they themselves don't know. Neither possibility makes me want to subscribe.

kristianc 9y ago

This feels like Vox - another attempt to 'explain the news', or 'provide more context'. The fundamental problem that these sites run into is a thorough understanding of issues in the news requires context, and very often not the kind of context that can fit into an 800 word blog post on a subject. An 800 word blog or article of any sort necessitates that you're going to make choices about which evidence you're going to include, which sources are credible and which sources are not, which sources add to the discussion vs which only serve to obscure. As soon as you do that, you're adding bias. You can set out to build an 'evidence based' news site, but what you quickly find is that you've built a site with paid journalists (who have their own biases) supported by volunteers (who are the people most likely to have political skin in the game). The problem is that people want a shortcut for everything - they want an 800 word post that will tell them everything they need to know about Syria. No such thing exists. There's no substitute for actually putting in the work and navigating the bias yourself.

anothercomment 9y ago

All these efforts have the same issue that existing media outlets have: why should they be more trustworthy than the existing media? All the newspapers in existence already claim that their number #1 goal is to report the truth. We all know they tend to fail miserably.

tmalsburg2 9y ago
That's actually explained in the video. Wales says that news media don't have the resources to produce high-quality output because the competition for clicks is so fierce. WikiTribune addresses this in two ways: First, they don't participate in said competition for clicks because they won't run on ads but donations. In other words, their customer is the reader who has an interest in quality. Second, they recruit citizen journalists who can help produce articles that a traditional news business would not be able to afford. Just paraphrasing. Watch the video.
- anothercomment 9y ago
  I don't think money is the issue. Journalists have their own agenda and tweak and omit accordingly.
  - trendoid 9y ago
    There is barely any human on this planet without an agenda. Not sure what your point is. Is it that we should stop trying new experiments with news because some humans are involved?
    - anothercomment 9y ago
      No, they shouldn't claim they are better and have no agenda. My point is these projects are bound to fail. Of course they will be "helpful" to some - after all, everybody picks some sources they trust. So if you feel you can trust the WikiThingie, then I guess it is helpful to you. Just don't make any glorious claims about beating fake news.

mcculley 9y ago

I was excited to read the announcement. Then I discovered it is not really ready to go. This gives me the impression that it is half baked. That's really not the impression they should be making with something so important. I tried to register as a supporter. Upon submitting my credit card, I got a CloudFlare error. I have no idea what was supposed to happen when I registered. When I received the confirmation email, I clicked the "confirm" button, was asked to prove I was human by identifying photos of gas stations, then taken to the website of impossible.com instead of WikiTribune.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hartsdown 9y ago

My BS detector tells me WikiTribune will fail but will collect lots of money from gullible CrowdFunders. Sorry, no evidence to justify that conclusion apart from the fact that at the moment it's a bit like watching a video of some device floating in a river that somehow against the law of physics is going to power a small village :-)

hartsdown 9y ago

fs111 9y ago

How is a 28 year old fashion model exactly going to advise them on anything related to journalism?

tentacule 9y ago
On the bottom right side of the page you can see "Powered by Impossible" which is her website.

davidlago 9y ago

Anybody else getting stuck after the payment screen? I ended up getting a cloudflare error...

andrewla 9y ago

I'm interested to see how this project evolves. As it is, even before all the furor about "fake news", I found myself consistently using Wikipedia to get summary and background information about ongoing news events, where mainstream news sources would present new data without any context and deliberately avoiding showing information about primary sources where available in favor of more internal links to other stories that give a glimpse of the point-in-time view of an ongoing story. This is even more pronounced for retrospective coverage, where developments in the story as it had evolved are hard to glean from the coverage at the time, but important facts are surfaced throughout the coverage that are often elided in a retrospective published by a news source, but are well-represented, even controversially (where facts disagree or question the overall narrative). My main complaint about the current trend in journalism (under Trump) is that the desire to sell clicks is so strong that you get no idea whether anything that happens is highly unusual or just routine, but the negative spin is so heavy that I can no longer trust that I'm being told how unusual each event is unless I really dig into it to find out. A great example is the ongoing harassment of international travelers in the US. The impression I get is that things have gotten much worse, but there's certainly ample evidence of unpleasant behavior even under previous administrations, and some slim cherry-picked data saying that it's gotten worse. This is clearly a space where better sourcing of primary sources would help to make things a lot clearer, and to an extent, a somewhat adversarial approach to news research would help to reduce the tendency towards alarmism.

dayaz36 9y ago

The premise that the news was truthful before the internet and we need to go back to having gatekeepers is comical

Thekohser 9y ago

Does anyone here remember Jimbo's earlier big "charity" venture -- CiviliNation? Jimbo was very recently on Reddit, trying to drum up donations for Wikitribune. It was asked, how will Wikitribune be different than the CiviliNation.org non-profit that Jimmy set up with his gal-pal Andrea Weckerle? Wales replied that since he was the "primary funder" of CiviliNation, the argument that it had bilked donors of money was moot in his mind. Let's see: CiviliNation's Form 990s from 2010-2014 total $82,428 in contributions. If Jimbo was the "primary funder", that's at least $41,215. So he attests that he donated over $41K to CiviliNation -- while Weckerle took $63,228 in salary, on total contributions of $82,428. Meaning, he basically bankrolled most of his girlfriend Andrea Weckerle's personal income from CiviliNation, which accomplished what? CiviliNation.org is barely a functioning website any more; its blog was last updated 13 months ago. Wales was so charitably inept that he forked over $41K to a failed attempt to "fix" online civility that ultimately accomplished not much more than keeping his girlfriend in food, clothes, and shelter for a few years, with tax-deductible dollars. Based on my observation of Jimmy Wales and Openserving, Wikia Search, CiviliNation, Impossible, and The People's Operator, I would say an easy case could be made that the man specializes in grifting and fraud.