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Infobitt – A movement to do for the news what Wikipedia did for encyclopedias

70 points by lsanger 12y ago

lsanger 12y ago
I started Wikipedia back in 2001 and after a long string of nonprofits have started Infobitt.com, which is, sort of, Wikipedia for news. We scour the web for facts about a given story, aggregate hand-written summaries of the facts, rank-order them, and rank-order whole stories (collections of facts = bitts) as well. At scale, we will make news less noisy and more efficient to catch up on. My claim is that only a giant online community could do this--traditional news orgs aren't big enough, and algorithms aren't sophisticated enough (any more than they're sophisticated enough to write Wikipedia).
- DanBC 12y ago
  How do you aim to tackle news about Russia & Ukraine? How do you aim to tackle lengthy bike-shedding over trivial nonsense? (for example, there are at least a million words about hyphens, dashes, endashes and em dashes).
  - lsanger 12y ago
    It's democratic, like Hacker News. We'll ask people not to include value judgments/obvious bias, but when it comes to relative ranking of facts, and how facts are worded (a matter for contests), we'll have to trust in the moderating influence of a wide variety of contributors. In the fullness of time, at scale, we'll have features permitting us to filter/weight the news presented to us according to our preferences. Breaking news into small pieces makes this possible.
- Washuu 12y ago
  What about Wikinews? It is a Wikimedia project and does collaborative community written articles. http://www.wikinews.org/ http://www.wikinews.org/ It is bothering me that I have to even sign up to view anything on Infobitt.com. That already is sending me away since I refuse to blindly sign up for any service.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    One of the main problems right now is that Wikipedia is being used for news, but the format is very poor.
    - tyang 12y ago
      Exactly.
    - lsanger 12y ago
      I have of course wondered what it would be like to do Infobitt with a wiki, and I considered setting a wiki up for that purpose. The bottom line is that wikis lack the potential reasons for using the Infobitt format in the first place--making it easier to compete as well as collaborate, making it possible to vote on small pieces of content (as well as the ordering of the content), etc. In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      Actually I prefer it to many news formats. If there is a big story (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots ) and you turn on the news or go to the front page of reuters.com in the middle of it they are usually focused on some up-to-the-second minutiae or the latest sub-story to have occurred in the larger story. This is fine if you have been paying attention to everything up until that point. This is not so great if you came in a bit late and want an overview of everything about the story.
      - lsanger 12y ago
        I actually agree. This is one area in which Wikipedia shines. But when it comes to breaking news, or tracking the actual order of events as they were reported, not so much.
      - sparkzilla 12y ago
- tyang 12y ago
  Cool idea worth testing.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  Interesting. How do you plan to keep coverage unbiased? A lot of bias manages to sneak into Wikipedia articles on current events in spite of their community guidelines and moderation.
  - fwn 12y ago
    I second this one. Traditional news have little problem with their reputation. In general it's known if the newspaper/magazine describes itself as leftleaning, conservative etc.. I can imagine this to be much harder in a community with a vague, biased crowd not identifiable due to the hight amount of uncoordinated accounts participating. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this bias-problem.
    - lsanger 12y ago
      Battling organized partisanship is a problem for down the road. My hope is that, by the time we deal with that, we'll have the funding and the personnel to code up a system that enables us to test out some technical solutions to this problem. There are lots of ideas...
  - lsanger 12y ago
    The fact that bitt and fact order, as well as which fact is displayed to the reader, is (or will soon be) subject to vote will provide a moderating influence, I hope. The reason Wikipedia articles are often biased is that people in authority in the community simply do not respect the neutrality policy. Even if most Wikipedians and most readers would prefer things to be more balanced, those in de facto control of an article determine the article's degree of bias. If the wording and order of facts is determined by open public vote, my hypothesis is that there will be more of a moderating effect.
    - briandear 12y ago
      However it would depend on who is doing the voting. If you, for example, used Twitter to gauge political sentiment, you'd be representing x% of the majority position, which would introduce a selection bias that would imply that x% represent the views of everyone. The problems with Wikipedia for controversial topics Ali's that typically both sides are highly motivated to "win" whereas those that aren't so motivated probably have the correct answer.
mojaam 12y ago
Sounds like a nice idea but isn't Google News already doing a decent job on this? It's going to be hard to beat the speed of Twitter or Google News in my opinion but I'll be curious to see where this goes.
- lsanger 12y ago
  Not really. Google doesn't summarize facts. It aggregates articles into clusters, which is useful, but it doesn't save us much time. Google also does a rather poor job of ranking the importance of stories, and often has old news for a long time and breaking news relatively late (or later than a motivated community, like Twitter, can have it).
- tyang 12y ago
  Google News' strength is ranking, not summarizing facts from different sources so you can avoid reading all the top 5 or 20 articles about a story. And, philosophically, do you HN folks really want to rely on the MSM to tell you what's important? And likes, shares and troll-ridden comments on news stories? Or do you want a democratized way to decide, collectively, what news stories and facts are important. Don't forget the NYT, etc. screwed up on no WMD's in Iraq. I was at a small group dinner with Judith Miller, ex-NYT, who's nice but she messed up. Who's checking the mainstream media?
sparkzilla 12y ago
It's not only feasible, we are already doing it! [1] I have also written extensively on why Wikipedia is not a newspaper [2] and the many flaws of Wikipedia for news-based content [2] Larry's attempt to break down the news into bits is an interesting experiment (and I wish him the best of luck as he goes forward). I'm not sure he will be able to attract the user base he needs to make it work though. We pay our writers, and are moving to implementing a revenue-share model to reward our writers. I'm not sure if the "work-for-free-while-the-owners-get-rich model works any more. [1]http://newslines.org http://newslines.org [2]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/ [3]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
- lsanger 12y ago
  I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for now); we summarize (and can rearrange) individual facts from many sources instead of making one narrative per story written by one person; and you don't rank the news in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how). We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    Thanks Larry. I think breaking down the info into bits is interesting, it's something we have been looking into for other parts of our site (not news). BTW, weren't you paid to create the first 1000 or so Wikipedia articles?
fennecfoxen 12y ago
Isn't that the purpose of http://en.wikinews.org/ http://en.wikinews.org/? What will this site do right that Wikinews doesn't?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Also, isn't it harmful to divert effort that could be going into WikiNews to a different project? WikiNews already struggles from a lack of editors. Is this substantially different in some way?
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    So, everyone interested in this idea should put their efforts into a failed project. No alternatives, because that would be harmful to a project people clearly aren't interested in developing. If wikinews isn't able to get this idea working, why is everyone else required to keep supporting it. Maybe it's time for an alternative.
    - vivooshka 12y ago
      If it's not working, then it needs needs to figure out why people aren't engaged. Otherwise, the natural progression is for people to move on to an alternative.
      - rgbrenner 12y ago
        Agreed. But Wikinews isn't some just started website. It launched in 2004. The idea that everyone needs to keep working on it until it's successful is becoming a joke. It's been a decade. It hasn't worked. People should feel free to develop an alternative. Wikinews has no right to a monopoly on an idea.
        tyang 12y ago
        The beatings will continue until Wikinews makes something people want
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
skadamat 12y ago
http://news.genius.com http://news.genius.com
- tyang 12y ago
  Great headlines for TMZ crowd.
- lsanger 12y ago
  Ever since I heard of this site, I've thought that (annotating the web, or parts of the web) is a great idea for a website, and they're executing it pretty well. It's not what we're doing, but it's still cool and my guess is they'll keep growing.
billconan 12y ago
hacker news is essentially a wikipedia for tech news.
- tyang 12y ago
  Yes. Also, techmeme.
leoh 12y ago
Seems like a race to the bottom. How will original, reliable reporters of facts have time to gather them if they aren't paid?
- vivooshka 12y ago
  Lots of people do things for free if they feel like they are getting something out of it. Pay is an incentive, but it is not black and white.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    What they would be getting out of this still seems to be a bit of a mystery.
    - tyang 12y ago
      Not for everyone. Look at Yelp and Wikipedia.
- tbc0 12y ago
  InfoBitt does not create original facts. The site curates and organizes news as it breaks.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    > InfoBitt does not create original facts. The site curates and organizes news as it breaks. I think that is the point. If Infobitt gets the readers and revenue, who will pay the originators of facts?
    - tyang 12y ago
      Some readers of The Information, The Wall Street Journal, Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg terminal owners, The New York Times. And you can have conferences like TechCrunch.
    - lsanger 12y ago
billaronson 12y ago
I have been contributing to infobitt for awhile now. The potential is for it to be a place where you get a rounded view of a story by multiple editors providing different facts. One option I hope will emerge is filters so I could see for example how the world news appears from an Australian perspective and then instantly flip and see it from a is perspective. That would be something that nobody has done as yet.
nanxi 12y ago
Yes, it's possible. I haven't seen a crowd-sourced news website with a focus on the community so much as Infobitt. The site's style is really good: the news is given to me in small pieces with easily digestible key facts. I can see a lot of people going to this site every day to know what's going on around the world.
- tyang 12y ago
  Yes. The design is far from perfect. This is just a beta version. For me, it's already a pretty good way to catch up on the main news fast. I can pick one bitt and learn some key facts and move on. Fast, easy, good enough. Much faster than any alternative.
lettercarrier 12y ago
I would love to see this work. Really love to. This has as big of a chance to improve humanity as wikipedia, I believe. The elimination of news curators will reduce other people thinking for them.
vivooshka 12y ago
I'm a happy user of InfoBitt. I went from skimming different news sources, such as Yahoo headlines, to strictly looking at InfoBitt for the top news of the day.
- nl 12y ago
  Is there a link to actually read some stories on the site?
  - vivooshka 12y ago
    You can sign up here at infobitt.com.
billaronson 12y ago
I've been contributing to infobitt now for about a year. I think the idea of breaking a story down into individual facts linked to sources is interesting. The game changer will come when we start adding value beyond that. There are some ideas percolating on that front. So I would encourage anyone interested to get on board and see where this takes us.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  Are you being paid, or is there a revenue share? If not, I wonder what your motivation is.
  - tyang 12y ago
    Yeah, crazy right? Folks already contributing hundreds of hours for free for some time. I can't imagine someone doing free work and writing, ranking restaurant reviews, editing, citing, writing pieces of encyclopedia entrees or electing Presidents like in 2008. Grassroots wha?
    - sparkzilla 12y ago
      Getting free contributions works for Wikipedia because it is not a business, has no ads and it's supported by donations. And because people get ego value from getting their contributions on a large, popular site. However, if the intention is to use free content to make the owners (and VCs) rich, then I am not sure that is a sustainable business model in the long term.
      - tyang 12y ago
        Quora and Yelp are for profit.
        sparkzilla 12y ago
        Yes, and their models are unsustainable. I wouldn't be an investor in any company that uses free labor.
Animats 12y ago
"Only a giant, international, online community could make this happen." Oh, yeah? It's already being done by an AI. That's what Google News does. Machines should think. People should work.
- lsanger 12y ago
  No, it's not. I use Google News when trying to figure out how to organize and summarize the news. Google News isn't very good at ranking news, and it doesn't even try to summarize the facts in the news.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    > Google News isn't very good at ranking news Is this something Infobitt evaluated or do you mean they don't rank it well for your personal needs? Also, they do provide 1-2 sentence summaries, but nothing as detailed as Infobitt. I happen to think Google ranks news surprisingly well, though not well enough to be my primary source (I doubt any machine or group of people will beat my personally selected and organized RSS feeds), but that's only for my needs. FWIW I don't logon to Google and block most tracking so I'm not sure they customize it for me. EDIT: Clarified first paragraph
    - tyang 12y ago
      Google News rankings are good and getting better. Issue is these other news aggregators just link you to articles that may be the best individual source. And you have to waste time reading an article instead of just getting the key news facts fast.
    - stevemeier853 12y ago
      Google news is likely based on algorithms and big data based on user searches and the # of times articles with keywords are getting selected. Nothing wrong with that, but far short of what an informed and active community can do. The two are complementary but quite different.
frozenport 12y ago
Sounds like Reddit
- tbc0 12y ago
  The site has not hard launched yet so you have to create an account to see the content. But I encourage you to do so. You will see how much different it is than Reddit.
- tyang 12y ago
  Sounds like you haven't read the quick summary on Infobitt just yet. http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762 http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762
smoe 12y ago
I really like the idea of summarizing various source in infobitt. But I think it still suffers from some points outlined in "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier" [0]. E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable. The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and later quitted my job at a news site. Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rol...
- lsanger 12y ago
  The news on the front page looks a little weird because a bunch of new people from Hacker News just arrived and ranked the news very quickly and sloppily. So it's OK. In a few days when things have settled down (??), you'll see it's much more plausible. As for being U.S.-heavy, we will of course have a U.K. version, other national versions, other languages...but that'll be post-launch and post-second funding round. In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted and what you're shown will be different. I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-) Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard-launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
krick 12y ago
> Is a “Wikipedia for news” feasible? I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news", but there are several reasons why it is empty talking. First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia is the data. Newspapers, TV, now all these news portals are services. There is important difference between data and service. Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good, which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you, disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably) politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior, people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on wikipedia. Service is something to be delivered. It must be on time, as "cold news" aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it (no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore). It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more. That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are making is a problem by itself. Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't even see any claims of how different form them it would be. Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else. Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.
hackuser 12y ago
A much higher proportion of news content than Wikipedia content is politicized, and Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues. How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post? Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government-controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)? It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized 'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more dedicated contributors.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues. It still functions better than most major news outlets do. Usually the only time I see an article that is very heavily slanted is when it the pet issue of some particular group or cause (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Sta... ) Its rules on sources aren't bad at all, it's just implementation which is a bit dodgy sometimes.
hackuser 12y ago
Less and less do I trust the wisdom of the crowds, and Wikipedia. I want expertise, not the consensus of amateurs and the ignorant. Look how well the consensus of experts, or at least professionals, works at HN: useful, better than alternatives, but I wouldn't bank on it. A story, possibly apocryphal, about Richard Feynman: He gave a strong negative review to a textbook that the other reviewers endorsed. When confronted he said he might not be the smartest person in the world, but was he more intelligent than the average of a hundred people? Certainly! Or from a Car Talk brain teaser: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're talking about? What about 100 or 1,000 people? I'm pretty sure they know less, as they create in their echo chamber greater certainty and additional untruths. (I am overstating the case for effect; there is value in the aggregate factual knowledge of crowds, and they are not always ignorant.)
- MJHardy 12y ago
  Wikipedia contributions are not averages of average people; they are written by those who choose to participate, not by a random sample of the earth's population. In some fields, Wikipedia is held in high esteem by many professionals.
- stevemeier853 12y ago
  One idea is to develop credibility and reputation over time by contributing useful facts. It's not raw crowd numbers but rather contributors with reputation which will yield results. Think of StackOverflow but for news instead of computer Q&A.
  - lsanger 12y ago
    This is a good idea. We need to code the "like" feature as the first step to implementing this.
- lsanger 12y ago
  As I have said several times before, Wikipedia doesn't follow Surowiecki's rules for "wisdom of crowds" effects. The Infobitt model has an advantage over wikis that will enable a wisdom of crowds effect. People contribute and vote independently of each other, not by having to agree on a single version of the content. Yes, there can be comments, and that will have a biasing effect; but what people say in comments is obviously not as important as their votes, which they can exercise independently of each other and comments. Also, since the pieces of content are short and fungible, they are therefore capable of being subject to contests. We can submit competing versions of facts, and the best can rise to the top. Finally, every fact in Infobitt has to be sourced, and the fact is a summary of the source; and (soon) we'll be able to compete to write the best summary. So, to be sure, we'll have bad summaries occasionally, but generally I think we'll have good ones, once we've built the community up some more.
denchik37 12y ago
Quick googling of news ontologies reveale plenty of established knowledge models. Why does the world need one more?
- tyang 12y ago
  None of which are being used to deliver quality news much note concisely at low cost.
frankydp 12y ago
Feels very much like news.google.com. With the voting on GN being time and search traffic? I am not sure how the determination on GN ordering works, but the idea of human curated news seems an even more sensation driven principle than the current network news industry. Even HN falls victim to sensationalism on a regular basis, and I presume most of HN's users are somewhat invested in the quality. I am not meaning to detract from the effort, but the outcome for such a scenario seems pretty repeatable. Especially with the history of non-niche vote driven news outlets/sites, and their predilection to not be viewed as quality, definitive, or substantive.

70 points by lsanger 12y ago

I started Wikipedia back in 2001 and after a long string of nonprofits have started Infobitt.com, which is, sort of, Wikipedia for news. We scour the web for facts about a given story, aggregate hand-written summaries of the facts, rank-order them, and rank-order whole stories (collections of facts = bitts) as well. At scale, we will make news less noisy and more efficient to catch up on. My claim is that only a giant online community could do this--traditional news orgs aren't big enough, and algorithms aren't sophisticated enough (any more than they're sophisticated enough to write Wikipedia).

DanBC 12y ago
How do you aim to tackle news about Russia & Ukraine? How do you aim to tackle lengthy bike-shedding over trivial nonsense? (for example, there are at least a million words about hyphens, dashes, endashes and em dashes).
- lsanger 12y ago
  It's democratic, like Hacker News. We'll ask people not to include value judgments/obvious bias, but when it comes to relative ranking of facts, and how facts are worded (a matter for contests), we'll have to trust in the moderating influence of a wide variety of contributors. In the fullness of time, at scale, we'll have features permitting us to filter/weight the news presented to us according to our preferences. Breaking news into small pieces makes this possible.
Washuu 12y ago
What about Wikinews? It is a Wikimedia project and does collaborative community written articles. http://www.wikinews.org/ http://www.wikinews.org/ It is bothering me that I have to even sign up to view anything on Infobitt.com. That already is sending me away since I refuse to blindly sign up for any service.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  One of the main problems right now is that Wikipedia is being used for news, but the format is very poor.
  - tyang 12y ago
    Exactly.
  - lsanger 12y ago
    I have of course wondered what it would be like to do Infobitt with a wiki, and I considered setting a wiki up for that purpose. The bottom line is that wikis lack the potential reasons for using the Infobitt format in the first place--making it easier to compete as well as collaborate, making it possible to vote on small pieces of content (as well as the ordering of the content), etc. In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    Actually I prefer it to many news formats. If there is a big story (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots ) and you turn on the news or go to the front page of reuters.com in the middle of it they are usually focused on some up-to-the-second minutiae or the latest sub-story to have occurred in the larger story. This is fine if you have been paying attention to everything up until that point. This is not so great if you came in a bit late and want an overview of everything about the story.
    - lsanger 12y ago
      I actually agree. This is one area in which Wikipedia shines. But when it comes to breaking news, or tracking the actual order of events as they were reported, not so much.
    - sparkzilla 12y ago
tyang 12y ago
Cool idea worth testing.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
Interesting. How do you plan to keep coverage unbiased? A lot of bias manages to sneak into Wikipedia articles on current events in spite of their community guidelines and moderation.
- fwn 12y ago
  I second this one. Traditional news have little problem with their reputation. In general it's known if the newspaper/magazine describes itself as leftleaning, conservative etc.. I can imagine this to be much harder in a community with a vague, biased crowd not identifiable due to the hight amount of uncoordinated accounts participating. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this bias-problem.
  - lsanger 12y ago
    Battling organized partisanship is a problem for down the road. My hope is that, by the time we deal with that, we'll have the funding and the personnel to code up a system that enables us to test out some technical solutions to this problem. There are lots of ideas...
- lsanger 12y ago
  The fact that bitt and fact order, as well as which fact is displayed to the reader, is (or will soon be) subject to vote will provide a moderating influence, I hope. The reason Wikipedia articles are often biased is that people in authority in the community simply do not respect the neutrality policy. Even if most Wikipedians and most readers would prefer things to be more balanced, those in de facto control of an article determine the article's degree of bias. If the wording and order of facts is determined by open public vote, my hypothesis is that there will be more of a moderating effect.
  - briandear 12y ago
    However it would depend on who is doing the voting. If you, for example, used Twitter to gauge political sentiment, you'd be representing x% of the majority position, which would introduce a selection bias that would imply that x% represent the views of everyone. The problems with Wikipedia for controversial topics Ali's that typically both sides are highly motivated to "win" whereas those that aren't so motivated probably have the correct answer.

mojaam 12y ago

Sounds like a nice idea but isn't Google News already doing a decent job on this? It's going to be hard to beat the speed of Twitter or Google News in my opinion but I'll be curious to see where this goes.

lsanger 12y ago
Not really. Google doesn't summarize facts. It aggregates articles into clusters, which is useful, but it doesn't save us much time. Google also does a rather poor job of ranking the importance of stories, and often has old news for a long time and breaking news relatively late (or later than a motivated community, like Twitter, can have it).
tyang 12y ago
Google News' strength is ranking, not summarizing facts from different sources so you can avoid reading all the top 5 or 20 articles about a story. And, philosophically, do you HN folks really want to rely on the MSM to tell you what's important? And likes, shares and troll-ridden comments on news stories? Or do you want a democratized way to decide, collectively, what news stories and facts are important. Don't forget the NYT, etc. screwed up on no WMD's in Iraq. I was at a small group dinner with Judith Miller, ex-NYT, who's nice but she messed up. Who's checking the mainstream media?

sparkzilla 12y ago

It's not only feasible, we are already doing it! [1] I have also written extensively on why Wikipedia is not a newspaper [2] and the many flaws of Wikipedia for news-based content [2] Larry's attempt to break down the news into bits is an interesting experiment (and I wish him the best of luck as he goes forward). I'm not sure he will be able to attract the user base he needs to make it work though. We pay our writers, and are moving to implementing a revenue-share model to reward our writers. I'm not sure if the "work-for-free-while-the-owners-get-rich model works any more. [1]http://newslines.org http://newslines.org [2]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/ [3]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/

lsanger 12y ago
I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for now); we summarize (and can rearrange) individual facts from many sources instead of making one narrative per story written by one person; and you don't rank the news in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how). We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  Thanks Larry. I think breaking down the info into bits is interesting, it's something we have been looking into for other parts of our site (not news). BTW, weren't you paid to create the first 1000 or so Wikipedia articles?

fennecfoxen 12y ago

Isn't that the purpose of http://en.wikinews.org/ http://en.wikinews.org/? What will this site do right that Wikinews doesn't?

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Also, isn't it harmful to divert effort that could be going into WikiNews to a different project? WikiNews already struggles from a lack of editors. Is this substantially different in some way?
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  So, everyone interested in this idea should put their efforts into a failed project. No alternatives, because that would be harmful to a project people clearly aren't interested in developing. If wikinews isn't able to get this idea working, why is everyone else required to keep supporting it. Maybe it's time for an alternative.
  - vivooshka 12y ago
    If it's not working, then it needs needs to figure out why people aren't engaged. Otherwise, the natural progression is for people to move on to an alternative.
    - rgbrenner 12y ago
      Agreed. But Wikinews isn't some just started website. It launched in 2004. The idea that everyone needs to keep working on it until it's successful is becoming a joke. It's been a decade. It hasn't worked. People should feel free to develop an alternative. Wikinews has no right to a monopoly on an idea.
      - tyang 12y ago
        The beatings will continue until Wikinews makes something people want

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

skadamat 12y ago

http://news.genius.com http://news.genius.com

tyang 12y ago
Great headlines for TMZ crowd.
lsanger 12y ago
Ever since I heard of this site, I've thought that (annotating the web, or parts of the web) is a great idea for a website, and they're executing it pretty well. It's not what we're doing, but it's still cool and my guess is they'll keep growing.

billconan 12y ago

hacker news is essentially a wikipedia for tech news.

tyang 12y ago
Yes. Also, techmeme.

leoh 12y ago

Seems like a race to the bottom. How will original, reliable reporters of facts have time to gather them if they aren't paid?

vivooshka 12y ago
Lots of people do things for free if they feel like they are getting something out of it. Pay is an incentive, but it is not black and white.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  What they would be getting out of this still seems to be a bit of a mystery.
  - tyang 12y ago
    Not for everyone. Look at Yelp and Wikipedia.
tbc0 12y ago
InfoBitt does not create original facts. The site curates and organizes news as it breaks.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > InfoBitt does not create original facts. The site curates and organizes news as it breaks. I think that is the point. If Infobitt gets the readers and revenue, who will pay the originators of facts?
  - tyang 12y ago
    Some readers of The Information, The Wall Street Journal, Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg terminal owners, The New York Times. And you can have conferences like TechCrunch.
  - lsanger 12y ago

billaronson 12y ago

I have been contributing to infobitt for awhile now. The potential is for it to be a place where you get a rounded view of a story by multiple editors providing different facts. One option I hope will emerge is filters so I could see for example how the world news appears from an Australian perspective and then instantly flip and see it from a is perspective. That would be something that nobody has done as yet.

nanxi 12y ago

Yes, it's possible. I haven't seen a crowd-sourced news website with a focus on the community so much as Infobitt. The site's style is really good: the news is given to me in small pieces with easily digestible key facts. I can see a lot of people going to this site every day to know what's going on around the world.

tyang 12y ago
Yes. The design is far from perfect. This is just a beta version. For me, it's already a pretty good way to catch up on the main news fast. I can pick one bitt and learn some key facts and move on. Fast, easy, good enough. Much faster than any alternative.

lettercarrier 12y ago

I would love to see this work. Really love to. This has as big of a chance to improve humanity as wikipedia, I believe. The elimination of news curators will reduce other people thinking for them.

vivooshka 12y ago

I'm a happy user of InfoBitt. I went from skimming different news sources, such as Yahoo headlines, to strictly looking at InfoBitt for the top news of the day.

nl 12y ago
Is there a link to actually read some stories on the site?
- vivooshka 12y ago
  You can sign up here at infobitt.com.

billaronson 12y ago

I've been contributing to infobitt now for about a year. I think the idea of breaking a story down into individual facts linked to sources is interesting. The game changer will come when we start adding value beyond that. There are some ideas percolating on that front. So I would encourage anyone interested to get on board and see where this takes us.

sparkzilla 12y ago
Are you being paid, or is there a revenue share? If not, I wonder what your motivation is.
- tyang 12y ago
  Yeah, crazy right? Folks already contributing hundreds of hours for free for some time. I can't imagine someone doing free work and writing, ranking restaurant reviews, editing, citing, writing pieces of encyclopedia entrees or electing Presidents like in 2008. Grassroots wha?
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    Getting free contributions works for Wikipedia because it is not a business, has no ads and it's supported by donations. And because people get ego value from getting their contributions on a large, popular site. However, if the intention is to use free content to make the owners (and VCs) rich, then I am not sure that is a sustainable business model in the long term.
    - tyang 12y ago
      Quora and Yelp are for profit.
      - sparkzilla 12y ago
        Yes, and their models are unsustainable. I wouldn't be an investor in any company that uses free labor.

Animats 12y ago

"Only a giant, international, online community could make this happen." Oh, yeah? It's already being done by an AI. That's what Google News does. Machines should think. People should work.

lsanger 12y ago
No, it's not. I use Google News when trying to figure out how to organize and summarize the news. Google News isn't very good at ranking news, and it doesn't even try to summarize the facts in the news.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > Google News isn't very good at ranking news Is this something Infobitt evaluated or do you mean they don't rank it well for your personal needs? Also, they do provide 1-2 sentence summaries, but nothing as detailed as Infobitt. I happen to think Google ranks news surprisingly well, though not well enough to be my primary source (I doubt any machine or group of people will beat my personally selected and organized RSS feeds), but that's only for my needs. FWIW I don't logon to Google and block most tracking so I'm not sure they customize it for me. EDIT: Clarified first paragraph
  - tyang 12y ago
    Google News rankings are good and getting better. Issue is these other news aggregators just link you to articles that may be the best individual source. And you have to waste time reading an article instead of just getting the key news facts fast.
  - stevemeier853 12y ago
    Google news is likely based on algorithms and big data based on user searches and the # of times articles with keywords are getting selected. Nothing wrong with that, but far short of what an informed and active community can do. The two are complementary but quite different.

frozenport 12y ago

Sounds like Reddit

tbc0 12y ago
The site has not hard launched yet so you have to create an account to see the content. But I encourage you to do so. You will see how much different it is than Reddit.
tyang 12y ago
Sounds like you haven't read the quick summary on Infobitt just yet. http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762 http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762

smoe 12y ago

I really like the idea of summarizing various source in infobitt. But I think it still suffers from some points outlined in "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier" [0]. E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable. The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and later quitted my job at a news site. Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rol...

lsanger 12y ago
The news on the front page looks a little weird because a bunch of new people from Hacker News just arrived and ranked the news very quickly and sloppily. So it's OK. In a few days when things have settled down (??), you'll see it's much more plausible. As for being U.S.-heavy, we will of course have a U.K. version, other national versions, other languages...but that'll be post-launch and post-second funding round. In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted and what you're shown will be different. I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-) Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard-launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

krick 12y ago

> Is a “Wikipedia for news” feasible? I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news", but there are several reasons why it is empty talking. First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia is the data. Newspapers, TV, now all these news portals are services. There is important difference between data and service. Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good, which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you, disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably) politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior, people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on wikipedia. Service is something to be delivered. It must be on time, as "cold news" aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it (no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore). It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more. That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are making is a problem by itself. Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't even see any claims of how different form them it would be. Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else. Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.

hackuser 12y ago

A much higher proportion of news content than Wikipedia content is politicized, and Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues. How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post? Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government-controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)? It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized 'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more dedicated contributors.

crdoconnor 12y ago
>Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues. It still functions better than most major news outlets do. Usually the only time I see an article that is very heavily slanted is when it the pet issue of some particular group or cause (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Sta... ) Its rules on sources aren't bad at all, it's just implementation which is a bit dodgy sometimes.

hackuser 12y ago

Less and less do I trust the wisdom of the crowds, and Wikipedia. I want expertise, not the consensus of amateurs and the ignorant. Look how well the consensus of experts, or at least professionals, works at HN: useful, better than alternatives, but I wouldn't bank on it. A story, possibly apocryphal, about Richard Feynman: He gave a strong negative review to a textbook that the other reviewers endorsed. When confronted he said he might not be the smartest person in the world, but was he more intelligent than the average of a hundred people? Certainly! Or from a Car Talk brain teaser: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're talking about? What about 100 or 1,000 people? I'm pretty sure they know less, as they create in their echo chamber greater certainty and additional untruths. (I am overstating the case for effect; there is value in the aggregate factual knowledge of crowds, and they are not always ignorant.)

MJHardy 12y ago
Wikipedia contributions are not averages of average people; they are written by those who choose to participate, not by a random sample of the earth's population. In some fields, Wikipedia is held in high esteem by many professionals.
stevemeier853 12y ago
One idea is to develop credibility and reputation over time by contributing useful facts. It's not raw crowd numbers but rather contributors with reputation which will yield results. Think of StackOverflow but for news instead of computer Q&A.
- lsanger 12y ago
  This is a good idea. We need to code the "like" feature as the first step to implementing this.
lsanger 12y ago
As I have said several times before, Wikipedia doesn't follow Surowiecki's rules for "wisdom of crowds" effects. The Infobitt model has an advantage over wikis that will enable a wisdom of crowds effect. People contribute and vote independently of each other, not by having to agree on a single version of the content. Yes, there can be comments, and that will have a biasing effect; but what people say in comments is obviously not as important as their votes, which they can exercise independently of each other and comments. Also, since the pieces of content are short and fungible, they are therefore capable of being subject to contests. We can submit competing versions of facts, and the best can rise to the top. Finally, every fact in Infobitt has to be sourced, and the fact is a summary of the source; and (soon) we'll be able to compete to write the best summary. So, to be sure, we'll have bad summaries occasionally, but generally I think we'll have good ones, once we've built the community up some more.

denchik37 12y ago

Quick googling of news ontologies reveale plenty of established knowledge models. Why does the world need one more?

tyang 12y ago
None of which are being used to deliver quality news much note concisely at low cost.

frankydp 12y ago

Feels very much like news.google.com. With the voting on GN being time and search traffic? I am not sure how the determination on GN ordering works, but the idea of human curated news seems an even more sensation driven principle than the current network news industry. Even HN falls victim to sensationalism on a regular basis, and I presume most of HN's users are somewhat invested in the quality. I am not meaning to detract from the effort, but the outcome for such a scenario seems pretty repeatable. Especially with the history of non-niche vote driven news outlets/sites, and their predilection to not be viewed as quality, definitive, or substantive.