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Hello, world: this is WikiTribune
- qznc 9y ago> We’re using WordPress as the core of our launch platform I guess it makes sense to stay with PHP and reuse your infrastructure knowledge. Still, I believe Wikipedia is successful despite not because of the WikiMedia software. Wordpress is not exactly the hallmark of software engineering either.
- kiernanmcgowan 9y agoWordPress has been re-written in a Node stack https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso
- Sujan 9y agoWordpress.com is something different than the Open Source Wordpress(.org) that is installed on one's server.
- detaro 9y agoThat's a dashboard for managing Wordpress sites, not a rewrite of WordPress (nor is a rewrite like that planned)
- macNchz 9y agoThat is just an admin console which communicates with Wordpress via its API, the Wordpress core has not been rewritten.
- brightball 9y agoIt’s not, but PHP is still by far the best option for low cost hosting, low traffic hosting.
- blfr 9y agoAt any level above shared hosting it really doesn't matter whether you use PHP or any other popular web stack since you will have to manage the whole thing anyway.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 9y agoThere are cheap shared hosting services that provide other options.
- bovermyer 9y agoKeep in mind that they're trying to build a news source, not a platform for news sources. Choosing a stable, battle-tested platform is important for that scenario. There are a number of newspapers that use WordPress as their platform. This choice makes sense, from a mission standpoint.
- paulie_a 9y agoWordPress is battle tested in the same way the Pearl harbor was.
- superdug 9y agoName the second largest attack on Pearl Harbor
- trynewideas 9y agoMichael Bay.
- weego 9y agoYour base assumption then is that a measurable percentage of users could be put off because of the technology stack the platform is using?
- dna_polymerase 9y agoWho cares about what is running this project. What matters is that it fits the purpose. And if that is Wordpress at this point in time, fine. I would read a news site written in Cobol if the content is more unbiased and balanced than anything else.
- wybiral 9y agoI think the point they were trying to make is that the people who live in the house don't care that the nails are all hammered in with a screwdriver, but the people building it should.
- zamalek 9y agoWhen you are asking users for donations as frequently as Wikipedia does, engineering quality is very important. With better software comes lower resource usage, which means cheaper infrastructure, resulting in lower costs.
- webwanderings 9y ago> the ultimate arbiters of the truth are the facts of reality. This is, relative to what? Some possibilities: - relative to your geography - your personal biases - your priorities - relative to 'what you do not know what you do not know' We may not like to see it this way, but facts if reality are also relative. Just span things across longer period of time and you'll see.
- maxerickson 9y agoAnd yet people can read your post and see what you mean to convey. That things are eventually slippery doesn't undermine our ability to come closer to the truth of a given moment.
- webwanderings 9y agoThe top commenters are pretty much saying exactly, what I said in different words. If nothing else, Wikipedia is on a slippery-slope here.
- nileshtrivedi 9y agoWhat will be the copyright license of the content? Does it follow the same model as Wikipedia or is it a for-profit / proprietary venture?
- edraferi 9y agoInteresting idea, if poorly defined at the moment. I wonder how editorial control will work out. Wikipedia has a lot of well documented problems that they’ll get a second chance to avoid.
- ghostcluster 9y agoYes, it's hard enough to trust Wikipedia on any subject with ideological or political drama surrounding it.
- eleitl 9y ago> This is the launch of a project to build a news service. An entirely new kind of news service in which the trusted users of the site – the community members – are treated as equal to the staff of the site. We've seen how well that works with Wikipedia. This is only solvable by presenting a filtered view for each user. The Wikipedia principals have no skills nor an interest to produce such infrastructure.
- ptr_void 9y agoI'll have some more RSS feeds to add Eg: https://www.wikitribune.com/category/current-affairs/feed/?post_type=stories https://www.wikitribune.com/category/current-affairs/feed/?p...
- indubitable 9y agoThis is a really interesting project. I've wondered for some time why this hadn't already been done. The obvious problem is politics though. We love to talk about it, but it makes people goofy. And it's trivial to lie to people, through implication, without ever making a single false statement. For instance: - "Uber does not require drivers to pass any sort of driving examination. Uber vehicles are involved in hundreds of more crashes per year than [insert any domestic cab company.]" Both statements are completely honest and true. But the unstated implication is 100% a lie. The lack of context is everything. Uber fulfills 40 million rides a month - that's 480 million a year. If we assume an average trip length of 5 miles, that's 2.4 billion miles a year. That's orders of magnitude greater than any cab company and so without comparing rates of incidence, I've effectively created fake news without ever directly making a single false statement. This is something that regular mainstream media outlets regularly do today. In fact you can find numerous articles using this exact same intentionally broken logic on this exact issue, at various media outlets. It makes for nice scary headlines and thus gets those clicks. I think the question to be seen is whether 'WikiTribune' editors will step above this - and actually require news be true both in content and implication. Just because something isn't directly stated doesn't mean articles suggesting as much are any less culpable of deceit. If they're able to do this, this could be as revolutionary as Wikipedia was.
- nileshtrivedi 9y agoArticles shouldn't be "finished". Users should be able to annotate them (using Hypothes.is?) which can provide more context that authors might have missed.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoI've often wondered if that's intentional or not, people seem to have real difficulty with comparing things if it's any more complicated than X being bigger than Y. fivethirtyeight.com seem to have a policy of getting numbers correct rather than chasing a story which seems to help. Another good thing is experts that comment on news stories, to place their numbers in context e.g. the NHS in the news service, that covers all the details and is happy to concede that "we don't know" rather than always wrap things up neatly. https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/scarlet-fever-cases-england-highest-50-years/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/scarlet-fever-ca...
- zimablue 9y agoIn my opinion, the interesting decision at a news site (and determining the politics of a news site) is what gets printed/promoted. It's fundamentally different to an encyclopedia because an online encyclopedia can pretty much include everything, with a filter on notability. A news site that tried to include "everything that happened today" is useless, by definition news is a digest of facts over time where someone has applied the filter to what's important. If you do this by community views/claps I think you get medium - a massive slant towards social justice, whatever Trump last tweeted and other divisive topics. If you do it by some sort of committee arbitration like how Wikipedia resolves conflicts then that committee has all the power that matters, and there's less concrete logic to fall back on. I've read a few of the links on this thing and I can't find how they propose to do it.
- blfr 9y agoThey could add some filters and drilldowns available to the user. For example, you could get a feed of news with a certain name, tag, or regarding locations you care about.
- la_oveja 9y agoimo Reddit does it right: Hot content, new content, popular content, controversial content.
- junkscience2017 9y agono one goes to Reddit to read the linked articles, they go to Reddit to enter an echo chamber (like HN) or deliberately quarrel
- AliAdams 9y agoIt will be a hard road to walk, but if something like this can be pulled off in the way that Wales envisions, it could be a great resource. My major concern is how you prevent a motivated entity willing to throw resources at skewing certain types of stories a certain way, from outweighing the larger, but more apathetic with group of general contributors.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- EnderMB 9y agoThis sounds a lot like what Newsvine was in 2006, albeit with a different focus on how that news is generated? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine I'll be interested in their implementation, but it doesn't sound like it'll offer anything more than Newsvine did before they were bought out by MSNBC.
- gavreh 9y agoThanks for the reminder about newsvine - I enjoyed that service back in the day. I found a recent blog post by the founder: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/10/an-epitaph-for-newsvine https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/10/an-epitaph-f...
- kakarot 9y agoSimilar to something I've been brainstorming, but with one key difference. A pillar of my hypothetical crowd-sourced news platform is anonymity. Emphasis of trust is placed on the computed reputation of the poster, who may choose to be nameless or use a pen name for each post. With WikiTribune, trust is established by linking the name of the author to their identity, which can allow the reader to judge character and fall into an appeal to authority bias. I think these things might ultimately be bad for journalism in the world we currently live in. Sensitive topics need to be handled anonymously to avoid harassment, and the Wikitribune policy of "whitelisting" pseudonyms will turn away people who don't want to rock the boat where they can. Additionally, it allows people to become victims or beneficiaries of identity politics. We shouldn't judge the merit of a contributer by their real world identity, but by the quality of their contributions. This can, along with a gatekeeping system that prevents high-interest topics from being edited by a user who lacks sufficient rep, allow for a healthy news community to flourish, without the need for putting a target on the backs of every amateur journalist who wants to talk about what dangerous people are doing and not just run of the mill politics. I would rather contribute to a community headed by the legendary Jimmy Wales than start my own community, so I will approach him with my concerns to see if he can't see things my way. How do others feel about this trade-off in trust?
- spoovy 9y agoI think you are spot-on. It's a shame that people are harassed and bullied for speaking the truth but that's where we are at so we have to deal with it.
- mtgx 9y agoI assume 50% of its news won't be about Trump? I'd like to see journalistic projects that cover stuff that isn't covered by mainstream media, yet it's equally, or perhaps much more important. The mainstream media seems to mainly focus on whatever brings them most page views. And it often has a skin-deep understanding of the issues they cover, which often leads them to draw the wrong conclusions, too. A good start, but certainly not the only place to explore, would be the war in Yemen, the drone strike operations in the Middle East or any other operation the U.S. or other countries do "illegally", without informing their populace, the Saudi Arabia influence on the western world, stuff like that for which there is almost an unwritten rule that the mainstream media can't cover.
- danso 9y agoI have "trump" as a blocked word in my Twitter feed but would also concede that he requires a disproportionately sized slice of the daily news pie
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- qznc 9y agoI tried to read aljazeera.com, but soon dropped it. Most stuff is not relevant to me.
- ErikVandeWater 9y agoI think it would be interesting if it were a meta news-source. Cover the connections between journalists and the world - who they vote for, who they are married to, whether they often have corrections on their stories, their blunders, their awards. What topics they cover, whether they are positive or negative toward certain ideas, who owns which news sources, etc.
- TorKlingberg 9y agoI hope this goes somewhere. I have been very disappointed that the social technology of a wiki has not been used much after Wikipedia itself. In theory, an openly editable wiki cannot work. People will just vandalize everything and ruin it. Amazingly, it works in practice. Not perfectly, there are definitely biased articles and bad things in the community, but it works so much better than anyone could have predicted in 2001. Yet, noone has used that insight to create other great user-created websites with almost universal write access. There are various smaller wikis that cover areas too niche for Wikipedia, like minor Star Wars characters. There's been various ideas of more locked down wikis, or wikis overseen by an editorial team, but that's just missing the point. Wikipedia is great because of the amazing scale you get when anyone can go in and add their bit, without asking for permission.
- akavel 9y agoI disagree about "wiki not being used much [other than] Wikipedia [except super-niche areas]". Just a few successful, absolutely useful and worthwile as much as notable examples off the top of my head: - http://www.scp-wiki.net/ http://www.scp-wiki.net/ — platform for artistic expression - http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Wiki http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Wiki — practical FAQ for users, by users (I learned from it quite a few things I needed about the app) - https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/ — super practical, ultimate guide/HOWTO for many Linux-related technologies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoWWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoWWiki - not to mention cr*ploads of "corporate wikis" in corporate intranets where any and all information can be lost (ummm... "found" according to official corpo-speak...) I pose that wiki as a technology is now firmly entrenched and was without doubt revolutionary. (Btw, it was pioneered on http://c2.com http://c2.com, not "Wikipedia itself".)
- TorKlingberg 9y agoGood point, but I meant the social system of Wikipedia more than the technology. On a corporate intranet vandalism was never a concern, as you can always have their manager tell them to lay it off. You can separate wiki history quite clearly into pre-Wikipedia (c2 and friends) and post-Wikipedia. What disappoints me is that post-Wikipedia wikis are almost all "Wikipedia for <niche>", rather than something new.
- edf13 9y agoAn interesting take on a very difficult task... https://theoutline.com/post/2435/wikitribune-is-already-biased https://theoutline.com/post/2435/wikitribune-is-already-bias... Something we all would like to work - but I'm not sure it's easily possible to be neutral.
- lumisota 9y agoarguably, neutrality is an impossible task. where there is any editing or selection involved (be it by a person, or by an algorithm), neutrality disappears.
- Karunamon 9y agoReaching the speed of light is also technically impossible, that doesn't mean you stop trying. Being eternally vigilant aware of your bias and actively working to counteract it, rather than blithely pretending your policies prevent it, is the way to go. This requires merciless introspection and constant self-reevaluation, so it's no wonder that most organizations don't bother. Few are that self-aware. That said, I don't have high hopes for this. Wikipedia's insistence that only academia and mainstream media coverage are sufficient sources for articles all but ensure a predictable bias on any ideologically charged topic. Same people, same kinda project, same biases. They've not stated any reason why this will be different.
- mkstowegnv 9y agoYou ask your readers to believe that academia, the mainstream media and Wikipedia all have the same bias. An alternative hypothesis is that A) all three have albeit imperfect self correction mechanisms and are on average as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come, and B) it is not their bias but rather yours that is responsible for your claim. At the very least it seems disingenuous to abstain from naming the bias you claim all three have.
- Karunamon 9y agoLet's unpack this: * Academia does have a left leaning bias. http://theconversation.com/yes-academics-tend-to-be-left-wing-but-lets-not-exaggerate-it-74093* http://theconversation.com/yes-academics-tend-to-be-left-win... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/05/new-analysis-new-england-colleges-responsible-left-leaning-professoriate* https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/05/new-analysis-... (and others - I can find very little that actually challenges the belief) * The mainstream media has a left-leaning, status quo, (and as used in Wikipedia) American bias https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/27/dear-mainstream-media-why-so-liberal/?utm_term=.1ec1ff06056f* https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/... http://www.journalism.org/2006/10/06/the-american-journalist/* http://www.journalism.org/2006/10/06/the-american-journalist... Given that Wikipedia has, as enforced policy, that mainstream media and academic sources trump all else, it logically must share the same bias as its sources. This is even acknowledged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Systemic_bias_in_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Systemi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Consensus_and_the_.22hive_mind.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Consens... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias It's not like I'm making some accusation of conspiracy or malfeasance here, so there's no need to interpret it as an attack. This is simply the way the site and its user base operates given its current policies. If the media is getting something wrong, Wikipedia will necessarily get it wrong. If the Academic community is getting something wrong, Wikipedia will necessarily get it wrong. The reason I speak of these disparate groups as wholes is that, on Wikipedia, consensus determines what an article says, what gets relegated to a "criticism" section, and what can't be said at all. (Arguably, the biases of the editors will win over the actual state of the sources, but this is just my read on the policy) This is one of the downsides of acting as a tertiary source alone: you're only as good as your secondaries and primaries I then extend this inference out to this new project. It has the same people at the helm, will likely attract the same group of editors, and so it will share the same problems as Wikipedia proper.
- frik 9y agoI guess this will mean the dead to WikiNews (https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ) of Wikipedia. The history showed us... Jim has the power to remove things of Wikipedia and turn it t his own startup for profit. Remember the trivia sections in almost all a Wikipedia articles. Suddenly one day, Jim launched Wikia and in the same swoosh trivia sections got transferred over to Wikia and banned on Wikipedia. Including many articles about movie characters got removed from Wikipedia. We have to thank him for the initial Wikipedia, and for the short stint of Wikia Web search (the he unfortunately killed after a short while). But he should not be involved with Wikipedia anymore, in case he is still lurking around.
- supermdguy 9y agoI wonder what's going to happen to wikinews: https://wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
- davidgerard 9y agoNothing's happened since about 2006, so ... This is actually the great fear about WikiTribune: that it'll end up like Wikinews - nice launch, then drop to near no activity, point or interest. (I was along for the WikiTribune hack day in February, this is one of the things that was discussed at length.)
- femto 9y agoIn my experience, contributing to Wikinews was a daily grind compared to Wikipedia. Wikipedia was a chance to craft something long lasting over a period of time. Wikinews involved a similar amount of effort per article but invariably the item was largely irrelevant a day or two after it was written. It was hard to keep the news current. Out of curiosity, do you know if the group has any specific ideas in this regard and what they are?
- davidgerard 9y agoBasically the perception was that Wikinews was bogged down in process. So we came up with a simple obvious process on the spot. Then I looked up the Wikinews process ... and it was about the same. So clearly that wasn't the problem. The difference with WikiTribune is that there are paid journalists. This will I think help.
- femto 9y agoThanks for the reply. Paid journalists make sense, in that they can probably produce words faster than an amateur. I hope it's a success.
- davidgerard 9y ago
- junkscience2017 9y agoI predict this will end up somewhere between (HuffPost - celebrity news) on the low end and Atlantic on the high end. Not a news site but a service that crafts content for specific tastes and views with a veneer of respectability... but no dissent. There won't be ads, but most of the typical readers will use adblockers so this is just a moral position. Fact-gathering is done, it's called Reuters. Or AP. Reuters already fact-gathers in a timely manner and in many languages. Everything else is just opinion pieces disguised as journalism. Increasingly, this also encompasses WaPo and NYT, where most of the content is editorial rather than journalistic. There is actually little demand for another Reuters. Basically no one with power enters the news business to actually deliver the news. Look at Bezos, Jobs' widow, Koch(s), etc...they are promoting their worldviews and trying to steer society
- matt4077 9y agoWashPo just broke the allegations against Roy Moore. Before, they did Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations into the Presidents' foundation, and how it channeled donations into his businesses. The NYT has had dozens of investigative reports in the last year. They were, for example, the first to reveal the meeting of the President's son and advisors with the underbelly of Russian politics. I think they also broke the allegations against Al Franken. The wire services do valuable work, but they don't investigate. They are a mechanism to lower the costs of journalism by de-duplicating the manpower needed to, for example, attend press conferences. That approach is important, especially in times of financial pressures on journalism. But it doesn't suffice for the fourth estate to fulfil its duty to inform the public.
- junkscience2017 9y agoNYT would only break a story on Franken if they knew it was about to be widely circulated. As a crusading progressive who also has quirks and wit, he was their archetype, they surely agonized over taking him down even with the current #MeToo zeitgeist. I'm not bothered because NYT has basically accepted their place in the industry and anyone visiting the site knows what to expect WaPo is basically just a content site for Clintonites, as such, I would expect Roy Moore was a gift from heaven for them. If they are not careful, they will end up just as a less-fun HuffPost
- nurettin 9y agoAh, another website for Turkey to "block".
- nurettin 9y agoTruth hurts
- spoovy 9y agoI don't imagine this will last long. As soon as citizen journalists start to report on some of the unpleasant realities behind the current political upheavels the MSM will go into full attack mode. MSM: 'stop giving a voice to racists|islamophobes'. Jimbo: 'but we're the good guys, allowing anyone to report on their lived experiences'. MSM: 'well it sounds racist to us'. Jimbo: 'but they're factually correct'. MSM: 'whatever; some people think they're racist, therefore they are.' Jimbo: 'OK, we'll put some controls in place to stop the racist reporters..' And so the MSM gains another member and the project is dead in the water.
- ibdf 9y agoNo ads! This website is already a winner!
- aaronhoffman 9y agoI'd love to see a browser extension that allows this community to mark up existing news websites with other resources/arguments against. Similar to Rap Genius Web Annotator https://genius.com/web-annotator https://genius.com/web-annotator
- anigbrowl 9y agoThere's a Web Annotation Protocol which has been formalized by the W3c but nobody seems to be deploying it.
- sparkzilla 9y agoTry http://fiskkit.com/ http://fiskkit.com/
- mythrwy 9y agoThis is nice. https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
- ijafri 9y agoI don't get it's point at least as yet. Wikipedia works because there wasn't a free sober extensive alternative available.. there are billions of way to get news and authentic ones too. I don't see the point as yet. The blogging tried to revolutionize the citizen journalism.. but it's tiresome with little to none rewards. Comparing it to Wikipedia is comparing Apples to Oranges ..
- symlinkk 9y agoIf they want people to help, couldn't they put the code on Github or something? And, as other people have said, this is essentially a re-launch of Wikinews.
- elysian_eunoia 9y agoI have been telling people we need a news source that treats information like wikipedia. I hope this goes somewhere.
- eeks 9y ago<quote> My goals are pretty easy to understand, but grand in scope (more fun that way, eh?): to build a global, multilingual, high quality, neutral news service. </quote> There is no such things as neutral news. But you can strive for some good, honest reporting with high journalistic standards.
- Cyberdog 9y agoSeeing how poorly Wikipedia succeeds at neutrality much of the time, I don't have much hope this project will do any better.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoWhat are you benchmarking against? As compared to what you'll read in published books on the shelf (which seem to write whatever they feel like) or even mainstream media or even the average professor, I think wikipedia does an outstanding job.
- waynecochran 9y agoYou can't create what can't exist. Neutrality at best is just presenting as many different (credible) views as possible, but usually contains a "straw man" or two.
- msla 9y agoAs Wikipedia defines it, anyway, neutrality is biased towards the current scientific consensus, which cuts down on the fringe content and makes the supporters of things like homeopathy very, very angry: They think neutrality should mean "every position gets taken equally seriously", which is false balance, and go a bit berserk when Wikipedia's rules make the homeopathy article largely anti-homeopathy, by presenting the best current knowledge as fact and presenting homeopathy itself as discredited. There's no way to have a coherent, readable article which is philosophically neutral. Good thing Wikipedia doesn't try.
- 9y ago
- andrew_ 9y agoIf only there was a news source devoid of punditry and slant. But that seems to be the only thing that sells anymore. And sadly, upon looking into their Chronological Stories page, there are already several "Let me tell you why" articles, and articles ending with the ever-transparent "here comes an op-ed" question mark.
- Cyberdog 9y ago"Anymore?" Why do people think the reporting of yesterday was any less biased than that of today when there's plenty of evidence to the contrary?
- harrisjt 9y agoHow will they do investigative pieces?
- PatientTrades 9y ago> I want us to report objectively and factually and fairly on the news with no other agenda than this: The ultimate arbiters of the truth are the facts of reality. I really hope this idea takes off. The majority of people are itching for non-biased news. mainstream journalism has become 10% facts, and 90% opinions. Both sides just want to push their agenda
- Mizza 9y agoAs somebody who ran a (now defunct) journalism startup and is still heavily involved in crowd-sourced muck-raking: I think this is exactly the wrong approach to massively collaborative journalism. The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is investigation. Even before the digital age, "news" was a way to sell paper with a mark-up. Now it's a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. The fact that the fourth estate emerged was just a lucky byproduct of the "news" industry, even though it is the foundation of the modern respect for the role that journalism plays in society. When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is _process_, not product. Even though it has been tried unsuccessfully or semi-successfully many times (ex, old school WikiLeaks, OpenWatch, WikiNews, MuckRock), I still think that this is absolutely the problem that should be focused on. The product of this investigation shouldn't be an article with mass market appeal, but really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields. I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed and used, the keys are: transparency, data science, and communications process. Various initiatives have been successfully cobbled together using Google Docs, Facebook and Slack, but these are usually projects with finite scope and a handful of participants. Nothing has ever come close to the kind of impact and reach that Wikipedia has had. I currently run the service https://pubmail.io https://pubmail.io as a tool for investigators and reporters to be more transparent in their email correspondence. Additional tools I'd like to see are tools for aggregating, combining and slicing relevant datasets for interesting patterns, and a central hub for mission-driven investigative collaboration. This is what my startup made, but it turns out that this is not a very capital-friendly or profit-friendly idea, so I think it would require a patron like Jimbo to really make this happen in a scalable, impactful way. Still, I wsh this endeavor all the best of luck and hope that it pushes the needle in the right direction.
- snowwrestler 9y ago> really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields Decision makers of any import have no shortage of high quality information. The availability of information is not a significant limiting factor on good decisions by powerful people. For example: Trump has the greatest information resources in the known world at his command yet he makes shitty decisions basically nonstop. A shortage of information is not the social problem of today. The big social problem today is the selection of information. That has more to do with tribal trust and culture than the information itself. For all the shortcomings of Wikipedia (and there are many), it is a source of information that is widely trusted and used across tribal boundaries. A "news" organization that achieves the same thing would be good. There are plenty of people and orgs doing great investigations. The problems are getting them eyeballs, and getting past the trust barrier. Who knows if Wikitribune will do it.
- flowctrl 9y agoThe Civil project looks more feasible, as it actually pays investigative journalists for their work, while at the same time providing feedback/scoring for accuracy. https://joincivil.com/ https://joincivil.com/
- udfalkso 9y agoIf this is of interest, then you might also find Civil to be an interesting approach to this problem. They're attempting to decentralize the news and create marketplaces that drive the right behavior. https://joincivil.com/ https://joincivil.com/
- Jeff_Brown 9y agoRather than a sharp distinction between trusted users and everyone else, or content and non-content, or even between reading and writing, I believe what we need is the more quantum experience of a knowledge graph. One with an easy semantics for creating and navigating nested relationships. It would let users search for, say, "Statements about [topic] which [set of users] agrees on," or "Arguments against [hypothesis]," or "Examples of, stories about, and implications of [principle]", or "Statements which readers judged useful for [goal]." I wrote a demonstration program[1] that does this. I hope to attract more developers. [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lasermike026 9y agoTheir first task should be a tutorial on "What journalism is." followed by "What are facts."
- dredmorbius 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth
- raphar 9y agoofftopic: I really enjoyed the page on writing news articles. https://www.wikitribune.com/project/how-to-write-a-piece-of-journalism-for-wikitribune/ https://www.wikitribune.com/project/how-to-write-a-piece-of-...
- fiatjaf 9y agoSo basically people will read news from other sites and repost them to Wikitribune?
- sergiotapia 9y agoWordpress?
- grb423 9y agoSeems to me that a difficult aspect of the news editor's job is deciding what to cover. CNN does not cover "Clinton email scandal". Fox News does not cover "Russia collusion." If one of these outlets did so they would be pilloried for "platforming" or "normalizing". How do you guys think WikiTribune will gate their news?
- blahedo 9y agoAnother weird fail point: their entire discussion on their "Real names policy" ( https://www.wikitribune.com/project/real-names-policy-a-note-from-jimmy-wales/#talk https://www.wikitribune.com/project/real-names-policy-a-note... ) is being conducted by people who have already been vetted by the system; unclear if people who insist on pseudonyms are being let in, and thus whether their voice is even heard. Furthermore, the system mandates that you have a First and a Last name. Gonna be a problem for the people who only have one....
- lbearl 9y agoYou'd think an entity as large as they are would understand the complexities around names. It always seems to prudent to re-read http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... when something like this happens.
- ErikVandeWater 9y agoEveryone is talking about WikiTribune here as if they are certain what it is, but the article really hasn't answered any of the biggest questions (how it is determined which articles are given precedence over less important ones, how easy it will be to edit an article, whether users will be investigating actively or compiling information from other sources, etc). _It might be totally different from what any of us are envisioning at this point._
- zbentley 9y ago> a big part of the point of this letter is to invite journalists who might be excited to write with awe or gleeful disappointment at our launch to relax a notch or two. That sentence is something of a grammatical bus crash. What is he trying to say? Honest question. I'm interested, and don't understand.
- Zeklandia 9y agoSo, a new Infobitt?
- sparkzilla 9y agoInfobitt had a more radical strategy - to strip the news down into individual facts and then reconstruct articles from them. The problem was that the site used crowdsourcing, which is too slow a process to use for news - a problem Wikitribune will also come up against.
- Animats 9y agoThe trouble is, it's another news-recycling and aggregation site. We have too many of those now. Too many pundits. Not enough reporters on the street, or at least on the phone, out there collecting information. (Too many of the people who do have new information online are all about me, Me, Me!. News stories do not use "I".)
- nicky0 9y agoIs it just me or does this look a lot like Medium?
- daveheq 9y agoWouldn't this just use the same citation rules as Wikipedia? News sources deemed "authoritative" based on popularity or reputation? I've seen a lot of evidence later called "non-existent" or "fake" by these sources that I could previously trace before it was removed by the uploader or banned by an admin, even if it was archived and screenshotted.
- the_duke 9y agoApart from the many insightful comments here: I open up Wikitribune, and the very headline story is "Current Affairs: Trump retweets trigger storm with UK". Exactly the kind of click grabbing, contentless "news" crap I do not want to read, and don't consider "hight quality news".
- dkellari 9y agoInterested to see what emerges from this experiment. Will the wisdom of the crowds prevail or will it be the interests of a select few? It would be great to have a 'believability' weighting whereby the votes of more credible people count for more. Not a democratic solution but in fields where one has more knowledge it makes sense to defer to them - much like you would weight the opinion of a doctor more heavily than your barber for a health related issue. Now we only need to figure out who the credible people are...
- gpsx 9y agoI can see real potential here. I think one of the biggest problems today is news presented from a given perspective that is insensitive to other perpectives. What I mean by this is cases where people who have another perspective perceive the news story as being factual inaccurate. In the US, this results in two groups who both think the other group is unintelligent and crazy. And it results in the two sides isolating themselves. There is no common ground from which to talk. I am hoping there is a way to get around this. Another commenter made the point that people don't percieve unbiased news as unbiased. They usually perceive news that agrees with there opinion as unbaised. So it is not enough to simply be unbiased. You have to be percieved as unbiased by the different sides. I think this may be possible in a setting like wikitribune, if respected people from the different sides work together on a story (I'm allowing for limiting the contributors). When this happens they are forced to speak a language the other side can understand. And I think the general public, or at least some bi/multi partison segment of it, will believe in it, because it is coming in part from voices they respect. I'm not sure if this exactly how they plan on operating, but this is what I am hoping for.