> 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.
At 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.
Who 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.
I 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.
When 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.
Interesting 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.
> 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.
This 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.
Articles shouldn't be "finished". Users should be able to annotate them (using Hypothes.is?) which can provide more context that authors might have missed.
I'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.
This is the main reason why I like the idea of a wiki-based news source. That "simple" assertion can be clarified by future editors in exactly that manner, and traditional news sources cannot be.
Already Wikipedia is excellent in many ways for exactly this -- during the Catalonia independence event, Wikipedia had way deeper context about the situation than other news sources, including information about previous attempts at independence and other historical information that was relevant in contextualizing the events.
That said, I'm not sure that this is a feasible vision. Especially since this seems to be producing more long-form journalism rather than current-event based journalism. The line is obviously a bit blurry, but "Big Read: How fact checking evolved in the internet era" is journalism, for sure, but not really the kind of thing that benefits from a wiki approach. "Why Rohingya are world’s ‘most-persecuted minority’" is a lot closer, but the article itself is not aimed at a single continuous entry point for an ongoing event, but instead attempts to provide a single viewpoint into the situation.
The most important question is the algorithm to determine what is important - since anyone can participate in WikiTribune at any level, it must be an algorithm that sets what is important. Most algorithms for this are subject to both political bias and "surprise" bias (how surprising an event is, even if it's not important in the grand scheme of things).
In 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.
They 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.
On a tangent you prodded me towards an insight: as mentioned other places news might not be what we lack, but journalism. And for tech news, hn does a great (or ok) job of doing a "collective writeup" of many news items. True, the discussions can get side-tracked - and are often more speculation than analysis. But on any given "news like" story there tends to be enough background and insight to sum up to the content of a decent article on the given event/revelation.
No-one actually writes it up, so you might average 150-200% more text than a great article - on the other hand some bias will be balanced out.
I'm not sure machine learning is (will ever be?) a good fit to fill in the role of journalist. But I think hobbyist/specialists dedicating a bit of time to commenting paired with a handful of people writing up the emerging concensus could be at least as good as much current mainstream media. I think that's true whether the experts knows the ins and outs of circuit design or schoolboard and neighbourhoods in a corner of Afghanistan - and who's gotten monetary support to build schools or something.
> on any given "news like" story there tends to be enough background and insight to sum up to the content of a decent article on the given event/revelation.
Exactly. The investigation, the debate and the plurality of viewpoints are easier to find in a reddit comment thread than a newspaper.
I don't mean to bag on Reddit because I agree they do it very well (based on how frequently I personally use it), but I would still agree with folks who've pointed how it can be subverted. r/politics seems to be the poster child of these naysayers.
I don't quite understand how this is supposed to work anyway. In order to obtain genuine news, you need journalists and correspondents in the field. While sometimes regular citizens can do this job, it seems unlikely that they can do the work in general. Even newspapers and journal do not employ enough journalists, they also need to buy news from freelancers and press agencies.
It seems to me what they are planning is a mere news aggregation site instead. While this may be commendable if it's done the right way, it is also true that too many people already fail to to differentiate between those who actually report and produce news and those who merely copy&paste it from elsewhere or write opinion pieces about news.
I also don't understand, but I know that Jimmy Wales knows a little more of wikis and collaboration than me. I'd probably say that an editable encyclopedia wouldn't work. Now I consider it one of humanities greatest feats.
Actually, if I'm remembering the details correctly, Wales also didn't think it would work. Wikipedia arose as an offshoot of Wales' Nupedia. I don't think Wikipedia was his idea, and I believe he was opposed to the idea of something that was freely editable.
Well based on personal experience, or should I state a certain politically active relative who I need to ping about it.
It will be an interesting experiment co opted quickly to drive a specific political message. As in, they already use a mailing list to control reddit's political subs so a site like this is just another avenue to explore. any site where commenters have the ability to move into moderation positions or more is instantly corruptible and will be.
that is just how it is, PACs and related have realized the value and therefor they are assigned minders or whatever term you want to use to direct the conversation/etc the direction desired
> A news site that tried to include "everything that happened today" is useless,
That pretty much describes newspapers on in Internet age, though. I can trivially access newspaper websites across the US and much of the world, and see everything that happened recently that passes the local newspaper's bar for notability, which for a small town paper is going to be lower than for national news (as it should be).
We've developed (or should I say Google News and other sites have developed) systems to take filter the firehose in some fashion, and if WikiTribune started off simply linking to other people's reports on everything that happened every day, they would quickly be forced to develop their own filtering system.
Given Wikipedia's charitable mission, I imagine the system will be open in some fashion. While Wikipedia's committee holds an undue amount of power compared to random IP addresses editing that want to edit Wikipedia, think about how much power is bestowed upon the members of the board of the six companies that own 90% of the news media.
Right now, it takes a non-profit and their staff dedicated wholly to an issue (eg http://www.gunviolencearchive.org ) to offer data which a reporter can draw from, if not they are forced to do it themselves. I hope to see WikiTribune expose data and metadata about news stories that can then be plotted on a timeline to make it easier for reporters to see connections between stories, and allow to share those with commentary.
It 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.
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.
Similar 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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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:
- 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, not "Wikipedia itself".)
Good 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.
Ah, so you mean the various orgs, policies, moderators, etc. "administrative" social structures that emerged on Wikipedia? In other words, more or less "meta.wikipedia.org"? If yes, that was not clear to me from your original post (to tell the truth, still isn't; that's why I decided to hereby ask in the end).
As to the "something new" in this area, one thing that comes to my mind is some wiki-based experiment/game I seem to have seen once, where its own rules could be edited; I think it was framed as a kind of "social experiment", but I can't google it out now. Other than that, I'm afraid I'm still not exactly sure what you're trying to say, so I find it hard to discuss or acknowledge yet...
That said, for sure I seen the wiki tech used in more than one SCP-like narrative/worldbuilding case.
On the other hand, the c2 wiki was in fact a kind of encyclopedia already, so maybe a wiki just naturally matches with such structural model?
> As to the "something new" in this area, one thing that comes to my mind is some wiki-based experiment/game I seem to have seen once, where its own rules could be edited
By "new" do you mean you just wish they had a different elevator pitch, or do you wish for an entirely new platform with communication and collaboration features, maybe along the lines of Google Wave, or do you mean something different, like OpenStreetMap where it's globally collaborative like Wikipedia, just for a different sort of information.
The only other wiki project I know of that's the opposite of Wikipedia for <niche> is https://everipedia.org/ which tries to be a wiki for "everything" by not having Wikipedia's deletionist rules. It's an alright site but has nowhere near the traffic and name brand as Wikipedia, even though it has all the pages Wikipedia has.
Several hackerspaces/makerspaces are physical space which run on the "just give anyone access, don't worry" philosophy. It also works out suprisingly well. I know spaces where over 250 people have (electronic) keys, with about 10 minutes of vetting.
Is there actually that much wiki-ing going on on SCP-wiki? It always seemed that it was just the author doing anything with the pieces more like a fanfiction.net than a wiki.
SCP articles are written by anyone and posted by anyone(who is a member, which. Is staff approval via simple rules and entering a code in application) and the community votes on it. Anything below a certain threshold is deleted by staff.
SCP is a good example of things that can go wrong with a wiki other than vandalism.
Heavy handed self-proclaimed editors with too much time on their hands to stifle any creative writing that doesn't fit the mold of schlocky fan fiction.
Other than not being forkable to satisfy the people who's fiction is excluded, what's the problem? You can't satisfy everyone, those that want a consistent theme and voice would be unhappy if they ease up.
I recall running across c2 a few times .. there was also everything2.com from 1998 which was/is a community wiki with its own engine, and kuro5hin.com from 1999 which was wiki-ish as well
I think you're underestimating the value here. Sites like Wikia host an unimaginable sum of knowledge that appears nowhere else in the world. If you search for anything related to TV shows, comics, gaming, etc. you will end up on a Wikia article. For games like Minecraft, Wikis are a core part of the how you play the game.
True. I was surprised how easy OpenStreetMap was to edit. My own tiny street was misnamed. Many low-end GPS devices use that data. After I fixed that, deliveries and service became more reliable, and I stopped getting calls from people nearby but lost.
I never edited again after fixing the map for my own neighborhood. But that's fine. That's what you should do; check OpenStreetMap for places you know well and, if they need fixing, fix them.
Really? Wow. I recently moved in with my partner and we keep having issues with deliveries, I’d never have imagined it could be due to bad or missing OSM data. I’ll check when I’m near a computer.
arguably, neutrality is an impossible task. where there is any editing or selection involved (be it by a person, or by an algorithm), neutrality disappears.
Reaching 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.
You 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.
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.
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.
A small point.. What is called "left-leaning" in the U.S. looks right-leaning to most of the world. [source?] Supporting one (the less far-right one) of the two main business parties gets you called "left-leaning". Supporting health care apparently gets you called a communist! That seemed everyday opinion in the U.S. - it seemed absolute appalling idiocy to the world looking on. Up there with "freedom fries" etc. "The centre" I guess then falls somewhere halfway between a primetime news anchor and their right wing thinktank guest.
I think we have the stats to show that your A) is false, if nothing else.
Consider the fact that in the social sciences, about 18 percent of American professors are communists, and about 5 percent are conservatives[1].
In general, conservatives are outnumbered as faculty about 12 to 1 by liberals [2].
In order for these numbers to be "as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come", we would expect America to have 12 liberal voters for each conservative, and the Democratic Socialists of America to be the second most powerful political party, while the republicans would struggle to maintain a distant third place.
I won't label you with titles like 'biased' or 'disingenuous' however, because I find that rude and counterproductive to finding the truth.
My claim A is that academia/media/wikipedia are the best tools we have for arriving at what will be seen as the truth by the most people for the longest time into the future. You claim that A is false because the three are more likely to be influenced by persons who self identify as left leaning. Never mind that what is considered left and right has changed through history and varies around the world at the present. Never mind that liberals are anything but monolithic in their views and there is as much enmity between liberals as there is between liberals and conservatives. What I find rude is the implication that 'left' institutions can't be useful authorities because they are 'left'. Why is conservapedia utterly eclipsed by wikipedia? Because wikipedia's self correcting mechanisms on the whole work pretty well and produce something that most people find useful (cf Dawkins https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4173576/richard-dawkins-on...)
>You claim that A is false because the three are more likely to be influenced by persons who self identify as left leaning.
I think we misunderstand each other. I claimed that A was false because I took "are on average as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come" to mean it reflects the reality of the body of individuals, which I guess both of us agree is not the case. I don't think we really disagree on that much then.
For fun though, I'd like to point out that this applies to conservatives, too:
"Never mind that liberals are anything but monolithic in their views and there is as much enmity between liberals as there is between liberals and conservatives."
And also conservapedia is a failure because A) Shaffly is an authoritarian nutcase and B) vandals outnumbered serious posters 2:1 easily, since it's inception. I know this because I was one of those vandals back in my script kiddie 4chan days. They would sometimes just have to revert entire days worth of edits because for every 'good faith' edit there were a dozen there were less so, and often the difference is subtle, especially since you could invoke religious craziness at will on conservapedia.
(Apologies if you're joking, but you don't appear to be. Hmm but I'm not sure.)
"Consider the fact that in the social sciences, about 18 percent of American professors are communists.." - whoaaa! hehe. Well, that was the most remarkable start to a sentence I've experienced on HN.
Allow me to stop there, and examine for a moment how much of a fact that is. Well, more than a moment - I couldn't access "The social and political views of American professors" (2007) on that link, and it's 76pp long. It reports a 2006 survey. I think your "about 18 percent of American [social science] professors are communists" refers to pp40-1 :
"Before moving on to consider the substantive attitudes items, we consider three other political identities that professors may hold that would indicate something about their political views: whether they think of themselves as radicals, political activists, and Marxists. We queried respondents on these matters by presenting them with a series of labels - including "radical," "political activist," and "Marxist" - and asking them to indicate how well, on a seven point scale ranging from not at all to extremely well, the labels described them. ...Table 12 shows the percentage of respondents in each broad disciplinary grouping who said these terms described them at least moderately well (giving a score of 4 or higher).."
There's a figure of 17.6% given in the table for professors in the "Social sciences" + "Marxist category".
So, in a 2006 survey, 17.6% of social science professors said "Marxist" described them moderately well, extremely well, or somewhere in between.
I'll leave it there for now, just remarking that it strikes me as rather ironic that the "fact" you asked us to consider came as part of an argument purporting to show someone else's stats were false. I'm not sure of the technical term for what you were doing in your last sentence, but it wasn't pretty either.
Edit: I thought my comment was as usual tangential at best to the main story, but on second thoughts maybe this was a small journalistic investigation of exactly the kind hoped for? :-)
> There is no such thing as an objective highlight.
So by that logic, all documentation of anything is subjective, since it necessarily omits some details that someone, somewhere might consider relevant. That seems like a bottomless rabbit-hole and a means of avoiding debate. Are there any better standards for evaluating bias instead?
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.
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.)
In 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?
It will get killed by him (isn't Jim involved in both Wikipedia AND Wikia), just like Wikia meant the end of the "trivia" sections that were very popular on Wikipedia and featured on most articles up to the release of Wikia, then they got transferred over and banned from Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales used to have more authority. It was stripped from him by the community after he repeatedly abused it. However, despite this he still has the technical ability to not just remove arbitrary permissions from any user on any project but to grant them too, including to himself. (This is, in fact, mentioned in the link you posted - you must just have missed that part.)
> Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars (ideally with PhDs) to volunteer content.
I'm afraid that doesn't tell us the difference between Wikinews and WikiTribune.
I read your comment as "What's the difference to Wikinews", which is literally what you wrote, but you may have meant "with" which means my response was not directly relevant. WT ostensibly has made some changes/refinements -- which have tradeoffs that might be seen as undesirable to entrenched conventions at WN -- but it does seem that, on paper, WT and WN have the same fundamentals, i.e. what makes a Wiki what it is. And the content may not be substantively different either -- in fact, they could be mirrors of each other.
But my argument is that if WT's differences -- even if they are seemingly superficial like visual design and polish -- are enough to give WT even a veneer of authority and user-friendliness over WT, then the lack of fundamental differences is mostly besides the point. WT is a direct competitor to WN, few users are going to want to spend time/loyalty to both sites. And unlike Wikipedia, which has huge long-tail value, writing for a news site with a comparatively small audience would be a bit demoralizing when you could be writing for the much bigger competitor, especially if the pay (zero dollars) is exactly the same.
So the difference to WN is that if WT becomes more popular -- which it could just by Jimmy Wales continuing to be its salesman -- WN might become quickly lose its audience and purpose for existence.
I 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
WashPo 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.
NYT 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
> NYT 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.
So I'll preface this with saying I agree with your general point: newspapers are crucial to do important investigative journalism work.
That said, Reuters does do solid investigative journalism work. One example is the Taser scandal recently: https://gijn.org/2017/10/02/how-they-did-it-reuters-massive-... They also have opinion pieces, and long form pieces, although these aren't seen as much as their standard articles.
AP also does some investigative work. For example, "Americans buying salmon for dinner at Walmart or ALDI may inadvertently have subsidized the North Korean government as it builds its nuclear weapons program, an AP investigation has found" https://www.apnews.com/8b493b7df6e147e98d19f3abb5ca090a
> Does anyone besides partisan Democrats really care about Trump possibly having ties to Russians?
Literally anyone who cares more about the US, or their own country, more than they do about pushing an ultraconservative agenda. I get not believing the story, or believing it wasn't really that severe. But to just not care?
> The real news has already been broken by WikiLeaks (they are all spying on us) and TheIntercept.
Wikileaks has been exposed as partisan hacks at this point.
how can WaPo and NYT be government mouth pieces when the government is controlled by republicans.
That's the thing, Reuters is already an excellent source, and is freely available. They seem to be the most unbiased news source out there: because they sell news to literally everyone, they're forced to be as non-biased as possible. Quote from a popular comment of mine a year ago:
>They might sell the same article to Russia Today, the New York Times, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the Times of India, so they can't cater to one crowd's political biases. I'm serious; all these news sources pay for Reuters articles.
>And even if you don't like Reuters, you've got to respect the speed at which they get out correct news. Before the Twittersphere erupts, before CNN loses its mind, before the alerts on the radio, Reuters has it. And if they don't know something, they say that they don't know it. It can make for frustratingly light articles, but any time I'm annoyed how empty the article is I realize that if it was bigger it'd be fluff or unverified claims.
Ultimately, wire services like Reuters are the best source of unbiased news today. They make their money selling news to papers, not consumers, so blowing small news out of proportion doesn't really help them either: if a paper wants sensationalized news, they're very capable of producing it themselves.
Honestly, I think this project could be interesting to watch, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. If it takes off, I think the biggest plus to it will be investigative journalism that isn't usually done by wire services. But ultimately I think I'll continue to read Reuters for news.
I 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.
I'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
I 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 ..
<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.
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.
You 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.
As 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.
This is a very important point. The problem with satisfying people's desires for neutrality is that people have incompatible, often incoherent ideas about what neutrality is supposed to be.
Naturally, some people don't like Wikipedia's version of neutrality, though I happen to think it's quite a good one: neutral in its reflection of what reliable sources say, not substantively neutral on subject matter. So I'm not particularly troubled by the problem as it pertains to WikiTribune.
The fact that some people don't like their notion of neutrality isn't a problem with them in particular, so much as an inevitability that reflects the way people with incompatible opinions will react to any possible version of neutrality. So the question should be which among the notions of neutrality that will inevitably anger some people is the most preferable.
Surely there can be objective reporting on events. So do you mean that filtration that a news organization must perform (i.e. it's impossible to report on every event) will have some bias?
Every algorithm for promoting certain articles over others favors some groups over others. Even if you evaluate on neutral grounds, you're still favoring the groups that are in fact able to get you to consider things as news (eg, news wire services, active contributors, etc).
Let me elaborate and be more concrete. Suppose a special interest group - say, Comcast's PR team - wants your organization to consider their press release as "news". Either you accept their claim of newsworthiness and have more of a "for" slant, or reject or modify their claim and have more of an "anti" slant.
Or another example: the website itself is far easier to contribute to with stable electrical supply, broadband internet access, and an ample supply of free time. You can bet that the news is going to be more relevant to white-collar first-world educated folks than subsistence farmers in rural India. I mean, yeah, Indian subsistence farmers could contribute in principle, but in practice, you're going to get a lot of news suggestions from other folks, and those suggestions are going to wind up as news articles.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadI 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.
https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso
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.
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.
That things are eventually slippery doesn't undermine our ability to come closer to the truth of a given moment.
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.
Eg: https://www.wikitribune.com/category/current-affairs/feed/?p...
- "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.
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-ca...
Already Wikipedia is excellent in many ways for exactly this -- during the Catalonia independence event, Wikipedia had way deeper context about the situation than other news sources, including information about previous attempts at independence and other historical information that was relevant in contextualizing the events.
That said, I'm not sure that this is a feasible vision. Especially since this seems to be producing more long-form journalism rather than current-event based journalism. The line is obviously a bit blurry, but "Big Read: How fact checking evolved in the internet era" is journalism, for sure, but not really the kind of thing that benefits from a wiki approach. "Why Rohingya are world’s ‘most-persecuted minority’" is a lot closer, but the article itself is not aimed at a single continuous entry point for an ongoing event, but instead attempts to provide a single viewpoint into the situation.
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.
No-one actually writes it up, so you might average 150-200% more text than a great article - on the other hand some bias will be balanced out.
I'm not sure machine learning is (will ever be?) a good fit to fill in the role of journalist. But I think hobbyist/specialists dedicating a bit of time to commenting paired with a handful of people writing up the emerging concensus could be at least as good as much current mainstream media. I think that's true whether the experts knows the ins and outs of circuit design or schoolboard and neighbourhoods in a corner of Afghanistan - and who's gotten monetary support to build schools or something.
Exactly. The investigation, the debate and the plurality of viewpoints are easier to find in a reddit comment thread than a newspaper.
It seems to me what they are planning is a mere news aggregation site instead. While this may be commendable if it's done the right way, it is also true that too many people already fail to to differentiate between those who actually report and produce news and those who merely copy&paste it from elsewhere or write opinion pieces about news.
Go for it, Jimmy!
It will be an interesting experiment co opted quickly to drive a specific political message. As in, they already use a mailing list to control reddit's political subs so a site like this is just another avenue to explore. any site where commenters have the ability to move into moderation positions or more is instantly corruptible and will be.
that is just how it is, PACs and related have realized the value and therefor they are assigned minders or whatever term you want to use to direct the conversation/etc the direction desired
That pretty much describes newspapers on in Internet age, though. I can trivially access newspaper websites across the US and much of the world, and see everything that happened recently that passes the local newspaper's bar for notability, which for a small town paper is going to be lower than for national news (as it should be).
We've developed (or should I say Google News and other sites have developed) systems to take filter the firehose in some fashion, and if WikiTribune started off simply linking to other people's reports on everything that happened every day, they would quickly be forced to develop their own filtering system.
Given Wikipedia's charitable mission, I imagine the system will be open in some fashion. While Wikipedia's committee holds an undue amount of power compared to random IP addresses editing that want to edit Wikipedia, think about how much power is bestowed upon the members of the board of the six companies that own 90% of the news media.
Right now, it takes a non-profit and their staff dedicated wholly to an issue (eg http://www.gunviolencearchive.org ) to offer data which a reporter can draw from, if not they are forced to do it themselves. I hope to see WikiTribune expose data and metadata about news stories that can then be plotted on a timeline to make it easier for reporters to see connections between stories, and allow to share those with commentary.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
- http://www.scp-wiki.net/ — platform for artistic expression
- 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/ — super practical, ultimate guide/HOWTO for many Linux-related technologies
- 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, not "Wikipedia itself".)
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.
As to the "something new" in this area, one thing that comes to my mind is some wiki-based experiment/game I seem to have seen once, where its own rules could be edited; I think it was framed as a kind of "social experiment", but I can't google it out now. Other than that, I'm afraid I'm still not exactly sure what you're trying to say, so I find it hard to discuss or acknowledge yet...
That said, for sure I seen the wiki tech used in more than one SCP-like narrative/worldbuilding case.
On the other hand, the c2 wiki was in fact a kind of encyclopedia already, so maybe a wiki just naturally matches with such structural model?
That's touched on in SF, in "The Moon Goddess and the Son" (1979), by Donald Kingsbury. It's not developed there, just mentioned briefly.
You might be thinking of Peter Suber's Nomic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
Two of the largest instances are https://agoranomic.org/ and https://blognomic.com/
(I have never gone through the process myself, so if anyone else wants to clarify, please do.)
Heavy handed self-proclaimed editors with too much time on their hands to stifle any creative writing that doesn't fit the mold of schlocky fan fiction.
Do any wiki's support forking and merging?
None of these wikis have deep life and death financial interests tied to their content like news and indirectly political world views does.
Also the FBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaupedia
The DoD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoDTechipedia
The State Department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplopedia
https://github.com/Chaosthebot/Chaos
I think you're underestimating the value here. Sites like Wikia host an unimaginable sum of knowledge that appears nowhere else in the world. If you search for anything related to TV shows, comics, gaming, etc. you will end up on a Wikia article. For games like Minecraft, Wikis are a core part of the how you play the game.
OpenStreetMap.
I never edited again after fixing the map for my own neighborhood. But that's fine. That's what you should do; check OpenStreetMap for places you know well and, if they need fixing, fix them.
Thank you for the heads up!
Are the Wikipedia anti-spam/manipulation efforts discussed/outlined in detail somewhere?
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.
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.
* Academia does have a left leaning bias.
http://theconversation.com/yes-academics-tend-to-be-left-win...
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/...
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#Systemi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Consens...
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.
Consider the fact that in the social sciences, about 18 percent of American professors are communists, and about 5 percent are conservatives[1].
In general, conservatives are outnumbered as faculty about 12 to 1 by liberals [2].
In order for these numbers to be "as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come", we would expect America to have 12 liberal voters for each conservative, and the Democratic Socialists of America to be the second most powerful political party, while the republicans would struggle to maintain a distant third place.
I won't label you with titles like 'biased' or 'disingenuous' however, because I find that rude and counterproductive to finding the truth.
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147...
[2] https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-i...
I think we misunderstand each other. I claimed that A was false because I took "are on average as close to reflecting reality as any human enterprises have ever come" to mean it reflects the reality of the body of individuals, which I guess both of us agree is not the case. I don't think we really disagree on that much then.
For fun though, I'd like to point out that this applies to conservatives, too: "Never mind that liberals are anything but monolithic in their views and there is as much enmity between liberals as there is between liberals and conservatives."
And also conservapedia is a failure because A) Shaffly is an authoritarian nutcase and B) vandals outnumbered serious posters 2:1 easily, since it's inception. I know this because I was one of those vandals back in my script kiddie 4chan days. They would sometimes just have to revert entire days worth of edits because for every 'good faith' edit there were a dozen there were less so, and often the difference is subtle, especially since you could invoke religious craziness at will on conservapedia.
"Consider the fact that in the social sciences, about 18 percent of American professors are communists.." - whoaaa! hehe. Well, that was the most remarkable start to a sentence I've experienced on HN.
Allow me to stop there, and examine for a moment how much of a fact that is. Well, more than a moment - I couldn't access "The social and political views of American professors" (2007) on that link, and it's 76pp long. It reports a 2006 survey. I think your "about 18 percent of American [social science] professors are communists" refers to pp40-1 :
"Before moving on to consider the substantive attitudes items, we consider three other political identities that professors may hold that would indicate something about their political views: whether they think of themselves as radicals, political activists, and Marxists. We queried respondents on these matters by presenting them with a series of labels - including "radical," "political activist," and "Marxist" - and asking them to indicate how well, on a seven point scale ranging from not at all to extremely well, the labels described them. ...Table 12 shows the percentage of respondents in each broad disciplinary grouping who said these terms described them at least moderately well (giving a score of 4 or higher).."
There's a figure of 17.6% given in the table for professors in the "Social sciences" + "Marxist category".
So, in a 2006 survey, 17.6% of social science professors said "Marxist" described them moderately well, extremely well, or somewhere in between.
I'll leave it there for now, just remarking that it strikes me as rather ironic that the "fact" you asked us to consider came as part of an argument purporting to show someone else's stats were false. I'm not sure of the technical term for what you were doing in your last sentence, but it wasn't pretty either.
Edit: I thought my comment was as usual tangential at best to the main story, but on second thoughts maybe this was a small journalistic investigation of exactly the kind hoped for? :-)
> There is no such thing as an objective highlight.
So by that logic, all documentation of anything is subjective, since it necessarily omits some details that someone, somewhere might consider relevant. That seems like a bottomless rabbit-hole and a means of avoiding debate. Are there any better standards for evaluating bias instead?
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.
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.)
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?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Role_of_Jimmy_Wales#...
> Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars (ideally with PhDs) to volunteer content.
I'm afraid that doesn't tell us the difference between Wikinews and WikiTribune.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia
But my argument is that if WT's differences -- even if they are seemingly superficial like visual design and polish -- are enough to give WT even a veneer of authority and user-friendliness over WT, then the lack of fundamental differences is mostly besides the point. WT is a direct competitor to WN, few users are going to want to spend time/loyalty to both sites. And unlike Wikipedia, which has huge long-tail value, writing for a news site with a comparatively small audience would be a bit demoralizing when you could be writing for the much bigger competitor, especially if the pay (zero dollars) is exactly the same.
So the difference to WN is that if WT becomes more popular -- which it could just by Jimmy Wales continuing to be its salesman -- WN might become quickly lose its audience and purpose for existence.
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
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.
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
That's quite impressive wild conjecture.
That said, Reuters does do solid investigative journalism work. One example is the Taser scandal recently: https://gijn.org/2017/10/02/how-they-did-it-reuters-massive-... They also have opinion pieces, and long form pieces, although these aren't seen as much as their standard articles.
The real news has already been broken by WikiLeaks (they are all spying on us) and TheIntercept.
That last site, produces more in-depth investigative reporting than any of the government mouthpieces you have cited.
The only news that is important is news that is hostile to the government on which it is reporting.
The rest is just propaganda.
Literally anyone who cares more about the US, or their own country, more than they do about pushing an ultraconservative agenda. I get not believing the story, or believing it wasn't really that severe. But to just not care?
> The real news has already been broken by WikiLeaks (they are all spying on us) and TheIntercept.
Wikileaks has been exposed as partisan hacks at this point.
how can WaPo and NYT be government mouth pieces when the government is controlled by republicans.
>They might sell the same article to Russia Today, the New York Times, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the Times of India, so they can't cater to one crowd's political biases. I'm serious; all these news sources pay for Reuters articles.
>And even if you don't like Reuters, you've got to respect the speed at which they get out correct news. Before the Twittersphere erupts, before CNN loses its mind, before the alerts on the radio, Reuters has it. And if they don't know something, they say that they don't know it. It can make for frustratingly light articles, but any time I'm annoyed how empty the article is I realize that if it was bigger it'd be fluff or unverified claims.
Ultimately, wire services like Reuters are the best source of unbiased news today. They make their money selling news to papers, not consumers, so blowing small news out of proportion doesn't really help them either: if a paper wants sensationalized news, they're very capable of producing it themselves.
Honestly, I think this project could be interesting to watch, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. If it takes off, I think the biggest plus to it will be investigative journalism that isn't usually done by wire services. But ultimately I think I'll continue to read Reuters for news.
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.
https://web.hypothes.is/
And, as other people have said, this is essentially a re-launch of Wikinews.
There is no such things as neutral news. But you can strive for some good, honest reporting with high journalistic standards.
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.
There's no way to have a coherent, readable article which is philosophically neutral. Good thing Wikipedia doesn't try.
Naturally, some people don't like Wikipedia's version of neutrality, though I happen to think it's quite a good one: neutral in its reflection of what reliable sources say, not substantively neutral on subject matter. So I'm not particularly troubled by the problem as it pertains to WikiTribune.
The fact that some people don't like their notion of neutrality isn't a problem with them in particular, so much as an inevitability that reflects the way people with incompatible opinions will react to any possible version of neutrality. So the question should be which among the notions of neutrality that will inevitably anger some people is the most preferable.
That's a big statement, can you elaborate?
Surely there can be objective reporting on events. So do you mean that filtration that a news organization must perform (i.e. it's impossible to report on every event) will have some bias?
You could present articles in chronological order.
>you're still favoring the groups that are in fact able to get you to consider things as news
Yeah, that's essentially what I was saying.
Or another example: the website itself is far easier to contribute to with stable electrical supply, broadband internet access, and an ample supply of free time. You can bet that the news is going to be more relevant to white-collar first-world educated folks than subsistence farmers in rural India. I mean, yeah, Indian subsistence farmers could contribute in principle, but in practice, you're going to get a lot of news suggestions from other folks, and those suggestions are going to wind up as news articles.
Your second paragraph is a separate, and good, point.