
Hello, world: this is WikiTribune - nafizh
https://www.wikitribune.com/story/2017/10/30/media/hello-world/13988/
======
TorKlingberg
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.

~~~
akavel
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:

\- [http://www.scp-wiki.net/](http://www.scp-wiki.net/) — platform for
artistic expression

\-
[http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Wiki](http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Wiki)
— practical FAQ for users, by users (I learned from it quite a few things I
needed about the app)

\- [https://wiki.archlinux.org/](https://wiki.archlinux.org/) — super
practical, ultimate guide/HOWTO for many Linux-related technologies

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoWWiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoWWiki)

\- not to mention cr*ploads of "corporate wikis" in corporate intranets where
any and all information can be lost (ummm... "found" according to official
corpo-speak...)

I pose that wiki as a technology is now firmly entrenched and was without
doubt revolutionary. (Btw, it was pioneered on [http://c2.com](http://c2.com),
not "Wikipedia itself".)

~~~
TorKlingberg
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.

~~~
akavel
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?

~~~
cecilpl2
You are likely thinking of the game
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic),
which happens to be very well-suited for online play.

Two of the largest instances are
[https://agoranomic.org/](https://agoranomic.org/) and
[https://blognomic.com/](https://blognomic.com/)

------
zimablue
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.

~~~
jonathanstrange
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.

~~~
neves
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.

Go for it, Jimmy!

~~~
jamesrcole
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.

------
Mizza
As somebody who ran a (now defunct) journalism startup and is still heavily
involved in crowd-sourced muck-raking: I think this is exactly the wrong
approach to massively collaborative journalism.

The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is
investigation. Even before the digital age, "news" was a way to sell paper
with a mark-up. Now it's a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. The fact that
the fourth estate emerged was just a lucky byproduct of the "news" industry,
even though it is the foundation of the modern respect for the role that
journalism plays in society.

When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is
_process_, not product. Even though it has been tried unsuccessfully or semi-
successfully many times (ex, old school WikiLeaks, OpenWatch, WikiNews,
MuckRock), I still think that this is absolutely the problem that should be
focused on.

The product of this investigation shouldn't be an article with mass market
appeal, but really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers
in relevant fields.

I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed and used, the keys
are: transparency, data science, and communications process. Various
initiatives have been successfully cobbled together using Google Docs,
Facebook and Slack, but these are usually projects with finite scope and a
handful of participants. Nothing has ever come close to the kind of impact and
reach that Wikipedia has had.

I currently run the service [https://pubmail.io](https://pubmail.io) as a tool
for investigators and reporters to be more transparent in their email
correspondence. Additional tools I'd like to see are tools for aggregating,
combining and slicing relevant datasets for interesting patterns, and a
central hub for mission-driven investigative collaboration. This is what my
startup made, but it turns out that this is not a very capital-friendly or
profit-friendly idea, so I think it would require a patron like Jimbo to
really make this happen in a scalable, impactful way.

Still, I wsh this endeavor all the best of luck and hope that it pushes the
needle in the right direction.

~~~
austenallred
I also ran a now-semi-defunct crowdsource journalism startup (Grasswire).

What Wales will find (and I’ve talked with him about this) is that unlike
Wikipedia the news world isn’t suffering for lack of content. Specifically,
every single thing you could find on the WikiTribune page you could find in
another place, probably written just as well, and still available for free.

WikiTribune needs to develop an edge. “We’re accurate” isn’t an edge, because
most people consider news accurate and authoritative. “We’re fair” doesn’t
matter, because the people that think news is inherently biased have a
(probably biased) news source that they consider unbiased. They don’t appear
to be taking a “We’re focused on only important stuff” or any of the other
ways they could differentiate.

The power of crowdsourcing can/should be to produce types of news that for-
profit news doesn’t do as well. Deep, investigative stuff that’s hard and
expensive to do if you’re paying people for it. But that’s hard, and not many
people click on it. Once you’ve done all that hard work, someone at NBC will
take your research and write an article about it, tapping their enormous
audience, and link back to you as a source (hey thanks!) Most people will
never click.

There’s very little incentive to perform the type of journalism that’s
actually needed, and even if you create it you don’t necessarily benefit from
it.

~~~
austincheney
I can even put that into perspective. The first time I deployed to CENTCOM
(2004) there were more than 3500 US journalists already there (and there are
many foreign journalists there too). The first time I went to Afghanistan
(2009) I met one of the major CNN politics correspondents and his producer on
a flight. You could honestly make the argument that with so much coverage
putting your life on the line for a story that somebody else probably already
has may not be worth it.

In that context war and combat were the big sellers and got the most coverage,
because you just had to be in the right spot at the right time. There is
little or not investigation. The best news coming out of there had nothing to
do with combat action, but rather things that demanded real investigation. The
hard work of journalism. These stories were extremely rare, in comparison.

The other major issue is allowing an audience to dictate your subject matter,
which is my interpretation of crowdsourcing. I would say this is the quickest
way to defeat your primary mission of objectivity and shortest path to bias.
The big challenge here is how to determine what qualifies as a story worth
publishing, particularly for an international audience.

One way to limit bias is to disallow opinion pieces and editorials. Fox News
is, on occasion, a great source of journalism, but journalism doesn't drive
its ratings. Editorial pundits do, and a clear bias is the result.

~~~
smt88
Out of sincere curiosity, what have been their journalistic achievements?

Also, their bias is not out of a need to make money. It's not incidental. It's
an open, well-funded attempt to push the country to the right, and it worked.

~~~
austincheney
They do really good stats. CNN frequently uses Fox stats.

> Also, their bias is not out of a need to make money. It's not incidental.
> It's an open, well-funded attempt to push the country to the right, and it
> worked.

I completely disagree. The pundits make money from advertising sales. The
greater their following the more they can charge for ad time slots. Fox claims
to be the highest rated and most watched televised news. It isn't about
setting a political mandate. It is all about making money.

Moderates were pushed to the right after Obama's time in office just as they
were pushed to the left after Bush's second term. Now, it seems, many voters
are being pushed to the left since Trump has entered office. There isn't a
conspiracy here.

EDIT: Rupert Murdock was a Hillary Clinton supporter.

------
junkscience2017
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

~~~
matt4077
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.

~~~
owenversteeg
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-...](https://gijn.org/2017/10/02/how-they-did-it-reuters-
massive-database-of-taser-deaths/) They also have opinion pieces, and long
form pieces, although these aren't seen as much as their standard articles.

~~~
nandhp
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](https://www.apnews.com/8b493b7df6e147e98d19f3abb5ca090a)

------
eeks
<quote> My goals are pretty easy to understand, but grand in scope (more fun
that way, eh?): to build a global, multilingual, high quality, neutral news
service. </quote>

There is no such things as neutral news. But you can strive for some good,
honest reporting with high journalistic standards.

~~~
Cyberdog
Seeing how poorly Wikipedia succeeds at neutrality much of the time, I don't
have much hope this project will do any better.

~~~
waynecochran
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.

~~~
msla
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.

~~~
glenstein
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.

------
indubitable
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.

~~~
andrewla
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.

------
edf13
An interesting take on a very difficult task...

[https://theoutline.com/post/2435/wikitribune-is-already-
bias...](https://theoutline.com/post/2435/wikitribune-is-already-biased)

Something we all would like to work - but I'm not sure it's easily possible to
be neutral.

~~~
lumisota
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.

~~~
Karunamon
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.

~~~
mkstowegnv
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.

~~~
viridian
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.

[1]
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147.6141&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

[2] [https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-
registration-i...](https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-
in-economics-history-journalism-communications-law-and-psychology)

~~~
mkstowegnv
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...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4173576/richard-dawkins-on-science-
it-works-bitches))

~~~
viridian
>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.

------
the_duke
Apart from the many insightful comments here:

I open up Wikitribune, and the very headline story is "Current Affairs: Trump
retweets trigger storm with UK".

Exactly the kind of click grabbing, contentless "news" crap I do not want to
read, and don't consider "hight quality news".

------
blahedo
Another weird fail point: their entire discussion on their "Real names policy"
( [https://www.wikitribune.com/project/real-names-policy-a-
note...](https://www.wikitribune.com/project/real-names-policy-a-note-from-
jimmy-wales/#talk) ) is being conducted by people who have already been vetted
by the system; unclear if people who insist on pseudonyms are being let in,
and thus whether their voice is even heard.

Furthermore, the system mandates that you have a First and a Last name. Gonna
be a problem for the people who only have one....

~~~
lbearl
You'd think an entity as large as they are would understand the complexities
around names. It always seems to prudent to re-read
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/) when something like this happens.

------
aaronhoffman
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](https://genius.com/web-annotator)

~~~
anigbrowl
There's a Web Annotation Protocol which has been formalized by the W3c but
nobody seems to be deploying it.

------
supermdguy
I wonder what's going to happen to wikinews:
[https://wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page)

~~~
davidgerard
Nothing's happened since about 2006, so ...

This is actually the great fear about WikiTribune: that it'll end up like
Wikinews - nice launch, then drop to near no activity, point or interest. (I
was along for the WikiTribune hack day in February, this is one of the things
that was discussed at length.)

~~~
femto
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?

~~~
davidgerard
Basically the perception was that Wikinews was bogged down in process. So we
came up with a simple obvious process on the spot.

Then I looked up the Wikinews process ... and it was about the same. So
clearly that wasn't the problem.

The difference with WikiTribune is that there are paid journalists. This will
I think help.

~~~
femto
Thanks for the reply. Paid journalists make sense, in that they can probably
produce words faster than an amateur. I hope it's a success.

~~~
davidgerard
also, a lot of the discouraging factor at Wikinews was that the editors were
slow to review stuff, and WikiTribune has paid editors as well.

------
ErikVandeWater
Everyone is talking about WikiTribune here as if they are certain what it is,
but the article really hasn't answered any of the biggest questions (how it is
determined which articles are given precedence over less important ones, how
easy it will be to edit an article, whether users will be investigating
actively or compiling information from other sources, etc).

_It might be totally different from what any of us are envisioning at this
point._

------
Animats
The trouble is, it's another news-recycling and aggregation site. We have too
many of those now. Too many pundits. Not enough reporters on the street, or at
least on the phone, out there collecting information.

(Too many of the people who do have new information online are all about me,
Me, Me!. News stories do not use "I".)

------
qznc
> 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.

~~~
brightball
It’s not, but PHP is still by far the best option for low cost hosting, low
traffic hosting.

~~~
blfr
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.

------
gpsx
I can see real potential here. I think one of the biggest problems today is
news presented from a given perspective that is insensitive to other
perpectives. What I mean by this is cases where people who have another
perspective perceive the news story as being factual inaccurate. In the US,
this results in two groups who both think the other group is unintelligent and
crazy. And it results in the two sides isolating themselves. There is no
common ground from which to talk. I am hoping there is a way to get around
this.

Another commenter made the point that people don't percieve unbiased news as
unbiased. They usually perceive news that agrees with there opinion as
unbaised. So it is not enough to simply be unbiased. You have to be percieved
as unbiased by the different sides.

I think this may be possible in a setting like wikitribune, if respected
people from the different sides work together on a story (I'm allowing for
limiting the contributors). When this happens they are forced to speak a
language the other side can understand. And I think the general public, or at
least some bi/multi partison segment of it, will believe in it, because it is
coming in part from voices they respect.

I'm not sure if this exactly how they plan on operating, but this is what I am
hoping for.

------
kakarot
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.

How do others feel about this trade-off in trust?

------
edraferi
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.

~~~
ghostcluster
Yes, it's hard enough to trust Wikipedia on any subject with ideological or
political drama surrounding it.

------
Jeff_Brown
Rather than a sharp distinction between trusted users and everyone else, or
content and non-content, or even between reading and writing, I believe what
we need is the more quantum experience of a knowledge graph. One with an easy
semantics for creating and navigating nested relationships. It would let users
search for, say, "Statements about [topic] which [set of users] agrees on," or
"Arguments against [hypothesis]," or "Examples of, stories about, and
implications of [principle]", or "Statements which readers judged useful for
[goal]."

I wrote a demonstration program[1] that does this. I hope to attract more
developers.

[1] [https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text)

------
udfalkso
If this is of interest, then you might also find Civil to be an interesting
approach to this problem. They're attempting to decentralize the news and
create marketplaces that drive the right behavior.

[https://joincivil.com/](https://joincivil.com/)

------
flowctrl
The Civil project looks more feasible, as it actually pays investigative
journalists for their work, while at the same time providing feedback/scoring
for accuracy.

[https://joincivil.com/](https://joincivil.com/)

------
ijafri
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 ..

------
EnderMB
This sounds a lot like what Newsvine was in 2006, albeit with a different
focus on how that news is generated?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine)

I'll be interested in their implementation, but it doesn't sound like it'll
offer anything more than Newsvine did before they were bought out by MSNBC.

~~~
gavreh
Thanks for the reminder about newsvine - I enjoyed that service back in the
day. I found a recent blog post by the founder:
[https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/10/an-
epitaph-f...](https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/10/an-epitaph-for-
newsvine)

------
andrew_
If only there was a news source devoid of punditry and slant. But that seems
to be the only thing that sells anymore. And sadly, upon looking into their
Chronological Stories page, there are already several "Let me tell you why"
articles, and articles ending with the ever-transparent "here comes an op-ed"
question mark.

~~~
Cyberdog
"Anymore?" Why do people think the reporting of yesterday was any less biased
than that of today when there's plenty of evidence to the contrary?

------
AliAdams
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.

------
mtgx
I assume 50% of its news won't be about Trump?

I'd like to see journalistic projects that cover stuff that _isn 't_ covered
by mainstream media, yet it's equally, or perhaps much more important. The
mainstream media seems to mainly focus on whatever brings them most page
views. And it often has a skin-deep understanding of the issues they cover,
which often leads them to draw the wrong conclusions, too.

A good start, but certainly not the only place to explore, would be the war in
Yemen, the drone strike operations in the Middle East or any other operation
the U.S. or other countries do "illegally", without informing their populace,
the Saudi Arabia influence on the western world, stuff like that for which
there is almost an unwritten rule that the mainstream media can't cover.

~~~
danso
I have "trump" as a blocked word in my Twitter feed but would also concede
that he requires a disproportionately sized slice of the daily news pie

------
ptr_void
I'll have some more RSS feeds to add

Eg: [https://www.wikitribune.com/category/current-
affairs/feed/?p...](https://www.wikitribune.com/category/current-
affairs/feed/?post_type=stories)

------
dkellari
Interested to see what emerges from this experiment. Will the wisdom of the
crowds prevail or will it be the interests of a select few? It would be great
to have a 'believability' weighting whereby the votes of more credible people
count for more. Not a democratic solution but in fields where one has more
knowledge it makes sense to defer to them - much like you would weight the
opinion of a doctor more heavily than your barber for a health related issue.
Now we only need to figure out who the credible people are...

------
daveheq
Wouldn't this just use the same citation rules as Wikipedia? News sources
deemed "authoritative" based on popularity or reputation? I've seen a lot of
evidence later called "non-existent" or "fake" by these sources that I could
previously trace before it was removed by the uploader or banned by an admin,
even if it was archived and screenshotted.

------
nileshtrivedi
What will be the copyright license of the content? Does it follow the same
model as Wikipedia or is it a for-profit / proprietary venture?

------
zbentley
> a big part of the point of this letter is to invite journalists who might be
> excited to write with awe or gleeful disappointment at our launch to relax a
> notch or two.

That sentence is something of a grammatical bus crash. What is he trying to
say? Honest question. I'm interested, and don't understand.

------
raphar
offtopic: I really enjoyed the page on writing news articles.

[https://www.wikitribune.com/project/how-to-write-a-piece-
of-...](https://www.wikitribune.com/project/how-to-write-a-piece-of-
journalism-for-wikitribune/)

------
fiatjaf
So basically people will read news from other sites and repost them to
Wikitribune?

------
frik
I guess this will mean the dead to WikiNews
([https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page)
) of Wikipedia. The history showed us...

Jim has the power to remove things of Wikipedia and turn it t his own startup
for profit.

Remember the trivia sections in almost all a Wikipedia articles. Suddenly one
day, Jim launched Wikia and in the same swoosh trivia sections got transferred
over to Wikia and banned on Wikipedia. Including many articles about movie
characters got removed from Wikipedia.

We have to thank him for the initial Wikipedia, and for the short stint of
Wikia Web search (the he unfortunately killed after a short while). But he
should not be involved with Wikipedia anymore, in case he is still lurking
around.

------
symlinkk
If they want people to help, couldn't they put the code on Github or
something?

And, as other people have said, this is essentially a re-launch of Wikinews.

------
nicky0
Is it just me or does this look a lot like Medium?

------
elysian_eunoia
I have been telling people we need a news source that treats information like
wikipedia. I hope this goes somewhere.

------
lasermike026
Their first task should be a tutorial on "What journalism is." followed by
"What are facts."

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth)

------
Zeklandia
So, a new Infobitt?

~~~
sparkzilla
Infobitt had a more radical strategy - to strip the news down into individual
facts and then reconstruct articles from them. The problem was that the site
used crowdsourcing, which is too slow a process to use for news - a problem
Wikitribune will also come up against.

------
harrisjt
How will they do investigative pieces?

------
nurettin
Ah, another website for Turkey to "block".

~~~
nurettin
Truth hurts

------
sergiotapia
Wordpress?

------
ibdf
No ads! This website is already a winner!

------
PatientTrades
> I want us to report objectively and factually and fairly on the news with no
> other agenda than this: The ultimate arbiters of the truth are the facts of
> reality.

I really hope this idea takes off. The majority of people are itching for non-
biased news. mainstream journalism has become 10% facts, and 90% opinions.
Both sides just want to push their agenda

------
eleitl
> 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.

------
webwanderings
> the ultimate arbiters of the truth are the facts of reality.

This is, relative to what?

Some possibilities:

\- relative to your geography \- your personal biases \- your priorities \-
relative to 'what you do not know what you do not know'

We may not like to see it this way, but facts if reality are also relative.
Just span things across longer period of time and you'll see.

~~~
maxerickson
And yet people can read your post and see what you mean to convey.

That things are eventually slippery doesn't undermine our ability to come
closer to the truth of a given moment.

~~~
webwanderings
The top commenters are pretty much saying exactly, what I said in different
words. If nothing else, Wikipedia is on a slippery-slope here.

