
WikiTribune – Evidence-based journalism - spearo77
https://www.wikitribune.com
======
Animats
So this is a for-profit operation where volunteers do the work? The site is
vague about such details. "People like you helping people like us help
ourselves?" Not good. You can be a for-profit or a non-profit, but pretending
to be a non-profit when you're not is deceptive.

Their terms of use are awful.[1] Note that they want to operate under British
law, where libel law favors the subject. They have an indemnification clause,
so their volunteers could be compelled to reimburse WikiTribune if WikiTribune
loses a libel suit. That's happened in the UK; see the famous McLibel case,
where McDonalds sued two Greenpeace volunteers. That decision was overturned
by the European Court of Human Rights. But, post-Brexit, that level of appeal
will no longer be available.

They also appear to have plagiarized the terms of use from other sites. One
section reads "We may, in our sole discretion, limit or cancel quantities
purchased per person, per household or per order. ... We reserve the right to
limit or prohibit orders that, in our sole judgment, appear to be placed by
dealers, resellers or distributors." That exact text appears on other sites,
usually ones that sell tangible goods. It's completely inappropriate here.
Sloppy.

This stuff matters when the business involves pissing people off. Don't
volunteer to write for this organization unless and until they work out the
liability issue.

[1] [https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-
use/](https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case)

~~~
derriz
Small point of information: the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU
institution and so will remain available to UK citizens after Brexit.

~~~
frobozz
True, but Mrs. May is not a fan of the Convention or the Court. Scrapping it
is not directly tied to Brexit, but it's still related, if only by being an
international agreement with the word "European" in it.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-
ca...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-campaign-
leave-european-convention-on-human-rights-2020-general-election-
brexit-a7499951.html)

~~~
HalfwayToDice
Do you have a credible news source, or just The Independent?

~~~
developerdanny
Since when was the independent not a credible news source? Genuine question.

~~~
losvedir
Oh, is it considered credible? Not being in the UK I don't have a sense of
this, but I had gradually built up a perception over the last couple months
that it was a sort of click-bait, mediocre source like, maybe, HuffPo or
BuzzFeed. I put it somewhere above Daily Mail but below BBC or The Guardian.

I started forming this opinion on an article that re-hashed the story of Flynn
being fired, but in such a poorly edited way with so much bluster that I
literally couldn't understand what the actual facts were it was trying to
convey. Fortunately, the article linked to the WaPo story it was based on, and
I was able to understand from there.

I wish I could find that story now, but unfortunately I couldn't. But I found
this one in my browser history, which I think shows the issues I have with it:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-
russi...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-russia-
investigation-now-has-specific-concrete-and-corroborative-evidence-of-
collusion-a7683386.html)

The headline is big and blustery, which is why I associate it with clickbait.
Then the first paragraph explains: "it has been reported". That is, the
Independent isn't doing the primary research itself; it finds other articles
and amplifies them. There's a bunch of sites that do this and it frustrate me,
since the original article usually is a little more nuanced. The whole game
here is to pick an article and make it more juicy.

Compare the headline of the Guardian article which this one is "amplifying":

> British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia. Exclusive:
> GCHQ is said to have alerted US agencies after becoming aware of contacts in
> 2015

with the Independent's take on the same story:

> 'Concrete evidence of collusion between Trump team and Russia' handed to
> official investigation. New evidence comes as sources reveal British spy
> agency GCHQ played pivotal role in uncovering interactions between US
> President and Russian operatives

It's the same story. The first paragraph of the Independent article uses the
"has been reported" phrasing, and the second links to the Guardian article
it's based on.

On top of that, the Independent article itself has boneheaded phrasing like:

> "a source allegedly told the Guardian."

The underlying Guardian article talks about "alleged conversations", but now
we get to the Independent, and now on top of that we have "alleged sources"!
How far away are we from what really happened here? I mean, I guess I'm glad
they're not saying "a source told The Guardian" since they don't really have
proof of that, but that's a weird thing to be strict about, and really just
indicates how worthless this 2nd hand reporting style is anyway.

So I basically ignore the Independent now whenever I see it come up. I didn't
realize they were supposed to be one of the "good" ones.

~~~
deadbunny
> but I had gradually built up a perception over the last couple months that
> it was a sort of click-bait, mediocre source like, maybe, HuffPo or
> BuzzFeed. I put it somewhere above Daily Mail but below BBC or The Guardian.

Is it just me that finds it's amusing that you came to a conclusion based off
of feelings and conjecture than hard evidence? You know given the subject
matter. Not disputing your points it just tickled me.

~~~
jpwgarrison
Without commenting on the implementation, I think this is the problem that
WikiTribune looks to solve? I know I have a fuzzy logic in my head that ranks
news sources. And I have since before the web, but possibly now we have the
tools to do some of the evidence based ranking you hope for! I am not
confident we are quite ready for it not to be gamed for profit though.

------
jim-jim-jim
The article in the dupe thread suggested that this would combat "fake news,"
but I dunno about that. I get the impression that people who digest
biased/questionable sources do it to express tribal affiliation more than some
genuine need to be informed. Hell, many people share articles without even
reading them; they're primarily concerned with what the headline in their feed
says about their character rather than the world at large. I'm not sure if
having (another) "evidence based" outlet is going to be of any use to your
cranky uncle.

I think the real promise lies in Wikitribune potentially going toe-to-toe with
"real news" like CNN or the Washington Post. These outlets also don't always
get the facts straight and can't be said to have a diehard following. If a
superior option presents itself, readers will follow.

~~~
backpropaganda
Wikitribune IS going to go toe-to-toe against CNN and WP. It's proposing a new
news model where you pay for news by donations.

~~~
gotothedoctor
Wikitribune's professed goal to raise enough money to pay 10 print
journalists. That seems like a big stretch?

------
RandyRanderson
Are the facts more important or are the topics? For example, the NYT is
generally pretty factual however IMO the topics they select and placement in
the periodical are the message.

So the fact that they write front page article on some terrorist attack in say
France that kills 5 while a similar drone strike on the same day in Afganistan
kills 20 and gets buried on page 30 is the point.

Who was is that once said the first casualty in any war is truth? And how many
blows did we miss that lead to that first casualty?

Regardless, I see little downside to this and hope it's successful!

~~~
abyssin
This is the root question. The discussion around fake news often touches the
subject of press neutrality. Some will say mainstream press is biased and has
an agenda, so-called mainstream will answer by proposing more fact-checking.
However, truth and neutrality are situated in different dimensions. It seems
to be relatively easy to avoid spreading lies for those who want to. Providing
neutral news is an entirely different type of problem. Addressing the critics
made to the press by promising fact-checked news might be perceived as only
one more manifestation of unjust discretionary power of the press to determine
what can be said.

Is striving for neutrality something the press should do? Or should it work on
clarifying how biased it is, and why?

~~~
mtdewcmu
>> Some will say mainstream press is biased and has an agenda

The people that say that are generally conservatives (or a subset of
conservatives). Liberals generally don't complain about the mainstream media
being biased. I'm just pointing out that the idea of the mainstream press
being biased and having an agenda is itself biased and has an agenda.

>> so-called mainstream will answer by proposing more fact-checking.

Fact checking is supposed to be automatic. When a mainstream news outlet gets
caught reporting false information, it's a big embarrassment. The NY Times had
the Jayson Blair incident a few years ago and it really stung. The Times also
apologized for over-hyping the Iraq War[1].

>> Is striving for neutrality something the press should do? Or should it work
on clarifying how biased it is, and why?

High quality news outlets already strive to do both. "Honest news" isn't a new
idea; it has always been a part of journalistic ethics.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-
th...](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-
and-iraq.html)

~~~
adamrezich
>The people that say that are generally conservatives (or a subset of
conservatives). Liberals generally don't complain about the mainstream media
being biased.

[http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-
bubb...](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-
journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048)

------
kristianc
This feels like Vox - another attempt to 'explain the news', or 'provide more
context'.

The fundamental problem that these sites run into is a thorough understanding
of issues in the news requires context, and very often not the kind of context
that can fit into an 800 word blog post on a subject.

An 800 word blog or article of any sort necessitates that you're going to make
choices about which evidence you're going to include, which sources are
credible and which sources are not, which sources add to the discussion vs
which only serve to obscure. As soon as you do that, you're adding bias.

You can set out to build an 'evidence based' news site, but what you quickly
find is that you've built a site with paid journalists (who have their own
biases) supported by volunteers (who are the people most likely to have
political skin in the game).

The problem is that people want a shortcut for everything - they want an 800
word post that will tell them everything they need to know about Syria. No
such thing exists. There's no substitute for actually putting in the work and
navigating the bias yourself.

------
dev_head_up
> WikiTribune is 100% ad-free, no one’s relying on clicks to appease
> advertisers; no one’s got a vested interest in anything other than giving
> you real news.

Ha! Oh c'mon, anyone who's experienced the activistism of certain groups on
Wikipedia knows there's plenty of people with a vested interest in this kind
of thing.

------
remarkEon
I understand what they're trying to do here, but beyond the problem of "fake
news" there appears to be a deep crisis within the profession of Journalism
itself. Wales is correct, in my opinion, that the proximate cause of this
crisis is indeed social media. (If you don't agree just ask yourself how often
you visit the masthead of whatever newspaper you typically read, and why that
might be the case.) But I just don't see crowd-sourcing as the solution to
this problem. I'm inclined to agree with @intended's diagnosis, and I feel
like the solution has to come from the profession of Journalism itself.

So, in attempt to not be "that guy" that just complains here's what I'd
suggest as a start.

\- Institutions need to drop their relationship with Facebook et al (The
Guardian has just done this [1]).

\- There's a few places (and in the interest of avoiding starting a flame war,
I'll forgo naming them explicitly) that parade themselves as "objective"
sources of news by telling you they're explaining "complicated" concepts in
digestible ways. In my view, that's just a rhetorical tactic to disguise what
is actually just _advocacy journalism_. It's not objective at all, and seeks
to _form your_ opinion rather than present you with data from which you _form
your own_. These places need to either be shut down, or pivot back to what
we'd traditionally consider actual reporting.

\- I consider myself reasonably well read, and read the actual, physical paper
daily (when I can, I suppose). There is a distinct difference between the
content I see pushed on the internet and what's in the traditional paper and
it's this: increasingly articles that belong on the opinion pages are pushed
elsewhere, probably because they know it'll generate more clicks elsewhere on
the site because it makes either a controversial or marginally supported
claim. In my view this _directly_ contributes to the loss of faith people have
in the Journalistic profession because it's just so damn easy to point out
instances of bias. So, hire some old school editors and fire the "social
media" guy and put content where it belongs.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head right now, but I'm
pretty convinced that "crowd-sourcing" is not the answer to this problem.

[1] [http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-
ar...](http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-
apple-news/)

~~~
smsm42
> Wales is correct, in my opinion, that the proximate cause of this crisis is
> indeed social media.

I don't think social media has much to do with it. I think the confusion
between the professions of journalist, entertainer and partisan political
operative has much more to do with it.

> If you don't agree just ask yourself how often you visit the masthead of
> whatever newspaper

Why would it be important if I visit the masthead? That's like saying
libraries are in crisis because people don't spend enough time in the lobby.
That's not why one visits the library! The frontpage is an utilitarian tool,
and if people can do without it, nobody cares.

> These places need to either be shut down

I don't think they should be shut down. If there's an audience for them, why
not? Nothing "should be shut down" \- if it has no audience, it will die off,
it it does have one - it should serve it. The problem here is the audience of
"give us facts and let us form opinion" is woefully underserved. This is
solved by creating, not shutting down.

> So, hire some old school editors and fire the "social media" guy

Social media guy didn't write that awfully biased article. Some "journalist"
did, the social media guy just posted the link on twitter. So why the social
media guy should suffer? "Journalists" that do bad job should be called out
and shamed, and social media is not where the blame should go. Hard to
believe, but twitter can be used for good too, if only people would want to...

~~~
backpropaganda
Source of funding is the key. Social media enabled the idea that news could be
free, and that's where the dominoes started falling. The signal to the news
company is that they need to keep pushing out articles which people click on
or share. The incentive of reputation and prestige got replaced by click-baity
and virtue signalling.

~~~
smsm42
True to some measure, but not completely - there are still degrees of click-
baity-ness and not all media companies are like buzzfeed or gawker and publish
exclusively in the style of "15 reasons why your biases are completely
justified and anybody who disagrees with you are evil, #8 will shock you!".
There are media companies that make conscious effort to do better - it's just
they think that doing better means shaping the news to help the audience to
arrive to "right" conclusions. They think this is their social responsibility,
not to inform, but to form "good" opinions and to destroy "bad" ones. Combined
with natural grouthink that arises in organizations having no focus on thought
diversity (which are pretty much all news orgs) it produces a very distinctive
mindset, which, as I noted in other place, is not just about money - it's
about doing what they genuinely perceive as the right thing.

In essence, they think the masses are too stupid to be fed bare truth, and
need to be put on a carefully selected diet of curated truths, half-truths and
sometimes outright lies, in service of a noble goal. I'd like to have the
informers back instead.

------
clarkmoody
I love the idea of trying a new business model for news delivery, especially
one centered around facts.

I seriously hope this project can overcome the prevalent, subtle biases in
media. For instance, every single headline from the recent French election
mentioned "far-right" Le Pen without also mentioning any ideological
affiliation of the other candidates. Painting your opponent as an extremist is
an effective political tactic, and "far-right" certainly sounds extreme. Were
most media outlets opposed to Le Pen, hence the extreme label? Why not label
any other candidates?

I'm not necessarily optimistic about the prospects for unbiased news, but I
will be watching this project as it progresses.

~~~
matt4077
They call her "far-right" because that's what she is. The party is called
"Front National", after all – "Front" as in war. They don't mind the label.
It's simply a description of fact, with the possible caveat that some of their
economic ideas aren't that different from those on the far left.

The media also regularly labels the other candidates, and nobody is
complaining about them any more than Clinton complained when someone said she
was left of Trump, politically.

Example from the NYT:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/europe/emmanuel-
mac...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-
marine-le-pen-france-
election.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article)

"[...]Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to go to a runoff to determine the
next president, official returns showed. One is a political novice, the other
a far-right firebrand "

"Mr. Macron, a former investment banker, abandoned traditional parties a year
ago to form his own movement with an eclectic blend of left and right
policies."

"[...] the mainstream right candidate François Fillon had nearly 20 percent,
and the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon had 19.6 percent."

As to why she is labeled "extreme", Wikipedia says:

\- She favours a "radical change of politics in order to drastically reduce
upstream the influx of illegal immigrants towards France"

\- She supported a referendum on whether to reinstate capital punishment in
France

\- "But I openly admit that, to some extent, I admire Vladimir Putin."

\- "I do not believe that there was an illegal annexation: there was a
referendum, the citizens of Crimea wanted to join Russia."

\- Denouncing "the US supremacy", she "refused the idea that France slavishly
followed the USA in this new stalemate"

~~~
malza
Why do they even need to label certain candidates? To me it just looks like
propaganda, or some sort of group signalling.

It's subconsciously saying the following: "Hey don't trust this one candidate
because we don't like that sort of thing and have attached a warning every
time her name is mentioned. The other candidates are fine, even the extreme
far left one, so no label needed - maybe we will add one for them on a rare
occasion."

I'm almost certain this sort of propaganda is the reason why the public spew
hatred at certain candidates, yet often cannot back up that hatred in relation
to their policies or behavour. Just so you know, I'm not backing a political
figure here, just pointing out what I notice when I read news websites -
particularly the big outlets.

~~~
matt4077
They are labelling the extreme-left candidate the "extreme-left candidate", so
any narrative derived from the "extreme-right" label happens entirely in the
reader's head.

Note that we're talking about the foreign press (from the French perspective)
here. They certainly have a motive to want le Pen to lose, but they don't have
much power in that regard.

It's also not a secret conspiracy to stop her because it's not a secret. The
slice of society journalists inhabit (i. e. having a university degree, having
lived abroad, having studied history) is scared to death of what a FN would
entail, such as the certain death of the European Union.

Again, you're operating from a wrong understanding of both "journalism" and
"objectivity". If some holocaust denier holds an event, it's their job to call
them out, not to report "both sides of the debate" in some sort of fake
balance.

~~~
themaninthedark
Why should it be a journalist job to call out a holocaust denier?

Shouldn't they just report who is holding the even and what views they hold? I
think most of the problem here is conflating journalists with advocates.

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

~~~
rocky1138
Why not improve MediaWiki instead?

~~~
spiderfarmer
Improvement means change. Change is scary and will break workflows. People
will resist.

I made big and small changes to a couple of online communities and believe me,
the amount of vitriol you receive from people that are the masters of the
domain they carved out for themselves will make you doubt every future
decision. Even when it's objectively the right thing to do.

~~~
rocky1138
It reminds me a lot of the conundrum large companies have when faced with the
prospect of disrupting their own cash cows.

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

~~~
LeoPanthera
I'm amazed that Wikinews still exists, if only because it seems so incredibly
unknown.

~~~
JdeBP
The amazing thing is that none of the BBC, The _Financial Times_ , _WiReD_ ,
or even _The Register_ (whom one would think most likely to want to ask hard
questions and not simply regurgitate the PR, given its coverage over the
years) asked this, or even mentioned Wikinews.

 _How does this relate to Wikinews, a crowd-sourced newspaper that actually is
connected to Wikipedia and that has been trying to put into practice much of
the model being put forward here for the past twelve years?_ is a fairly
obvious question. No journalist covering this story apparently asked it.

------
spearo77
Seems to be overloaded right now, but I found their campaign video via search
in Vimeo

[https://vimeo.com/214586867](https://vimeo.com/214586867)

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

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent)

~~~
stuffchunk
They are also working on an international version of their platform:
[https://thecorrespondent.com/](https://thecorrespondent.com/)

~~~
zigzigzag
Hmmmm. That website is ... unconvincing. At best.

 _The heart of De Correspondent is our founding document from 2013 – a
manifesto of sorts – and these core principles have informed how we’ve built
De Correspondent ... 1. De Correspondent provides an antidote to the daily
news grind. 2. De Correspondent challenges oversimplification and
stereotyping._

Here are the top four headlines from the "selected stories from our archives"
section on the front page:

"This is how we can fight Donald Trump’s attack on democracy"

"If Shell knew climate change was dire 25 years ago, why still business as
usual today?"

"We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of
Trump"

"How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry"

These headlines read exactly like a typical front page of the Guardian. How is
this "challenging oversimplification" or being "an antidote to the daily news
grind"? I can find content like that anywhere on the internet for free, its
value is literally zero.

The Manifesto itself does not seem very consistent. It says things like:

 _Correspondents are fair and independent, yet also explicitly subjective_

and

 _De Correspondent is ambitious in its ideals, yet modest in its claims_

after making a series of decidedly not modest claims. It also has this amusing
statement:

 _Although De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, we do not
strive to maximize profits for shareholders. A profit ceiling has been
stipulated in our statutes: Any profit distribution may not be greater than 5%
of revenues._

But 20 seconds googling throws up a claim that the average profit margin in
the newspaper industry is around 3.2%, which sounds about right. Average
profit margins across all industries are 10% but the news industry is famously
in decline and laying off employees, so 10% would be far too high. Aiming for
5% profit margins as if it's some great sacrifice indicates that either they
believe their readers don't know much about business, or they themselves don't
know. Neither possibility makes me want to subscribe.

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

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

------
rodionos
If this ends up being the same as data journalism, it would be great.

\-
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail)
\- home of ... data journalism

\-
[https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892](https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892)
\- seeking a ... data journalist

\- [https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-
mcphillips](https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips) \- ... is
a data reporter

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

------
andrewla
I'm interested to see how this project evolves. As it is, even before all the
furor about "fake news", I found myself consistently using Wikipedia to get
summary and background information about ongoing news events, where mainstream
news sources would present new data without any context and deliberately
avoiding showing information about primary sources where available in favor of
more internal links to other stories that give a glimpse of the point-in-time
view of an ongoing story.

This is even more pronounced for retrospective coverage, where developments in
the story as it had evolved are hard to glean from the coverage at the time,
but important facts are surfaced throughout the coverage that are often elided
in a retrospective published by a news source, but are well-represented, even
controversially (where facts disagree or question the overall narrative).

My main complaint about the current trend in journalism (under Trump) is that
the desire to sell clicks is so strong that you get no idea whether anything
that happens is highly unusual or just routine, but the negative spin is so
heavy that I can no longer trust that I'm being told how unusual each event is
unless I really dig into it to find out.

A great example is the ongoing harassment of international travelers in the
US. The impression I get is that things have gotten much worse, but there's
certainly ample evidence of unpleasant behavior even under previous
administrations, and some slim cherry-picked data saying that it's gotten
worse. This is clearly a space where better sourcing of primary sources would
help to make things a lot clearer, and to an extent, a somewhat adversarial
approach to news research would help to reduce the tendency towards alarmism.

------
lr4444lr
_Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring that that journalists only write
articles based on facts that they can verify_

This is hardly the only source of bias in the news, which is an age-old
problem. We'd be better off just expecting news organizations to announce
their bias up front so that we don't have to read between the lines in order
to ferret out its nuances.

~~~
dagw
Also 'verify' doesn't mean much. Even flat earthers can verify everything they
believe in.

~~~
spiderfarmer
No. That's not 'verifying' at all. They are dismissing facts and make it all
come down to something you have to 'believe'. Religion works the same way.

~~~
Neliquat
I know a christian biologist that steadfastly refuses to belive in any type of
evolution. We talked for hours about it, and he is convinced he is
intellectually correct. Never underestimate cognative dissonance.

------
empressplay
It concerns me that they don't know the difference between 'lead' and 'led'.

Otherwise I love the idea that there must be an attributable source to all
information they present -- no more "senior government officials" or
"anonymous FBI agents"...

~~~
carlmungz
Sometimes anonymous sources are the only way you can cover a story. For
example, during my time as a local journalist I regularly had former and
current employees of my local council leak information to me. But I couldn't
name them so I would refer to them as 'senior council officials' or 'council
insiders'.

~~~
Chris2048
> Sometimes anonymous sources are the only way you can cover a story

Then don't. Source won't go on record? Then they aren't a source.

~~~
carlmungz
That's not how it always works.

I once had a source come to me with information about how families were being
shipped in to my town from another city because the housing crisis affecting
the UK meant local councils could not house residents locally.

In another case, I was given salary details for council employees who were
being paid in a similar manner to this:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/nhs-chief-on-
reco...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/nhs-chief-on-
record-60000-a-month-as-numbers-off-payroll-soar/).

In one other case a council employee told me how morale was low in the
council's social services department due to pressure from senior officials and
the workload. The source said there were concerns over how this was affecting
the welfare of the children they were meant to look after.

In all three cases the stories checked out and in the published story I wrote
that the initial information came from an unnamed source. In the housing case
I was able to speak to some of the families and they went on record. In the
payroll case I published the salaries and the council did not say my
information was false. In the social services case they gave us a statement.

The problem with using anonymous sources comes when journalists use them as an
excuse for publishing unverified information. If my sources had gone on record
they would have most likely have lost their jobs meaning future whistle-
blowers/sources would not have spoken to me or would have not spoken to other
journalists in the future. If that happens how can institutions and
individuals be held to account?

~~~
Chris2048
Direct evidence is a substitute. But take this example:

> in one other case a council employee told me how morale was low

How can you verify this is true? How did you check it out?

~~~
carlmungz
On that particular point I made a judgement call based on the fact that
previous information this source had given me had checked out. The issue of
low morale among social workers is a topic that has been widely discussed over
the years in the UK along with that of high caseloads. Other people in the
town I had spoken to in the health and social care industry also expressed
similar sentiment about the state of social services. One of the first
'anonymous source' stories I did at the paper was about the social services
and police dropping the ball in a child abuse case where a father impregnated
his daughter. So that was the context of my judgement on that particular
point.

------
mcculley
I was excited to read the announcement. Then I discovered it is not really
ready to go. This gives me the impression that it is half baked. That's really
not the impression they should be making with something so important.

I tried to register as a supporter. Upon submitting my credit card, I got a
CloudFlare error. I have no idea what was supposed to happen when I
registered.

When I received the confirmation email, I clicked the "confirm" button, was
asked to prove I was human by identifying photos of gas stations, then taken
to the website of impossible.com instead of WikiTribune.

------
Thekohser
Does anyone here remember Jimbo's earlier big "charity" venture --
CiviliNation? Jimbo was very recently on Reddit, trying to drum up donations
for Wikitribune. It was asked, how will Wikitribune be different than the
CiviliNation.org non-profit that Jimmy set up with his gal-pal Andrea
Weckerle? Wales replied that since he was the "primary funder" of
CiviliNation, the argument that it had bilked donors of money was moot in his
mind.

Let's see: CiviliNation's Form 990s from 2010-2014 total $82,428 in
contributions. If Jimbo was the "primary funder", that's at least $41,215. So
he attests that he donated over $41K to CiviliNation -- while Weckerle took
$63,228 in salary, on total contributions of $82,428. Meaning, he basically
bankrolled most of his girlfriend Andrea Weckerle's personal income from
CiviliNation, which accomplished what?

CiviliNation.org is barely a functioning website any more; its blog was last
updated 13 months ago. Wales was so charitably inept that he forked over $41K
to a failed attempt to "fix" online civility that ultimately accomplished not
much more than keeping his girlfriend in food, clothes, and shelter for a few
years, with tax-deductible dollars.

Based on my observation of Jimmy Wales and Openserving, Wikia Search,
CiviliNation, Impossible, and The People's Operator, I would say an easy case
could be made that the man specializes in grifting and fraud.

------
intended
Reinventing the wheel, or in this case, reinventing the square wheel.

Wikitribune solves a problem, just not the problem they have defined as the
target.

They've used a naive view of the problem; the model under this ignores the
existence of antagonists and too much faith in crowd sourcing difficult
problems.

Antagonists will prey on services like this, and off the top of my head,
here's 2 ways in which such a service can be made biased.

1) baseless accusations, oft repeated. Find the facts inimical to your (the
antagonists) position. Ignore them.

Find facts which are borderline, and have dog whistle properties - highlight
these facts ad nauseum. Say that "Wikitribune is biased". Repeat till it
sticks.

Then target the facts inimical to you.

2) flood the service with facts that serve your cause- humans have only so
much working memory.

\----

The particular structure wikitribune has chosen, will result in issues.
There's a reason print news papers had an editor and a whole staff dedicated
to working together.

With volunteers there's no structure, and that causes failures, just consider
the Boston bomber case. Of course with a journalist in the mix the assumption
is that they will push back.

But the structure is supposedly egalitarian, which just means that this is
going to end up causing the same politicking, and admin arguing that plagues
Wikipedia.

Recruit everyone, don't get volunteers. Get the whole team.

> Articles are authored, fact-checked, and verified by professional
> journalists and community members working side by side as equals, and
> supported not primarily by advertisers, but by readers who care about good
> journalism enough to become monthly supporters

The wisdom of the crowd fails all too often. As another article recently
discussed, it's 5% of the people that take up most of your time.

How will this structure deal with truly divisive news articles? Or people who
have conflicts (and conflicts of interest) within the group?

How will you deal with the fact that one day someone can say "volunteer X was
a pedophile from <country>!"

Kudos for trying it.

This looks like a propaganda machine which will use the wiki brand about to be
born.

~~~
NovaS1X
I'd rather give this a shot than just shut it down with the cynical negativity
that we oft see on HN. There are obvious faults like you have pointed out, but
we have to try something to get us out of the the situation we're in.

This is the first honest effort I've seen that has some credibility.

~~~
intended
There's many efforts which have credibility, and just because it has jimmy
wales name on it doesn't make it credible.

Heres a previous discussion on the "fake news" problem with a far more
credible start, because theyve actually got a better idea of the problem, and
so are targetting an achievable goal -

[http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/](http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/)

discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13542428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13542428),
in February.

This isn't cynicism. I'm long long past that. This current media scenario has
been cooking for more than 2 decades.

Creating a less strict media structure will not fix it.

~~~
backpropaganda
Fake news is not a tech problem. It's better solved by incentive structures
than nonexistant AI.

~~~
intended
Which is a conclusion shared to an extent by the fake challenge, as stated on
the front page I linked

>Assessing the veracity of a news story is a complex and cumbersome task, even
for trained experts [3].

>Fortunately, the process can be broken down into steps or stages. A helpful
first step towards identifying fake news is to understand what other news
organizations are saying about the topic. We believe automating this process,
called Stance Detection, could serve as a useful building block in an AI-
assisted fact-checking pipeline. So stage #1 of the Fake News Challenge
(FNC-1) focuses on the task of Stance Detection.

In a nutshell, this interaction is the problem with the news cycle, and its
the audience as much as its the reporting. Most people don't click on the
link.

\--- From the FAQ, lower down the page -

> WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THE STANCE DETECTION TASK RATHER THAN THE TASK OF
> LABELING A CLAIM, HEADLINE OR STORY TRUE/FALSE, WHICH SEEMS TO BE WHAT THE
> FAKE NEWS PROBLEM IS ALL ABOUT?

ANSWER: There are several reasons Stance Detection makes for a good first task
for the Fake News Challenge:

Our extensive discussions with journalists and fact checkers made it clear
both how difficult “truth labeling” of claims really is, and how they’d rather
have reliable semi-automated tool to help them in do their job better rather
than fully-automated system whose performance will inevitably fall far short
of 100% accuracy.

Truth labeling also poses several large technical / logistical challenge for a
contest like the FNC:

There exists very little labeled training data of fake vs. real news stories.
The data that does exist (e.g. fact checker website archives) is almost all
copyright protected. The data that does exist is extremely diverse and
unstructured, making hard to train on. Any dataset containing claims with
associated “truth” labels is going to be contested as biased. Together these
make the truth labeling task virtually impossible with existing AI / NLP. In
fact, even people have trouble distinguishing fake news from real news.

The dataset we are using to support the Stance Detection task for FNC-1 was
created by accredited journalists, making it both high quality and credible.
It is also in the public domain. Variants of the FNC-1 Stance Detection task
have already been explored and proven feasible but far from trivial by Andreas
Vlachos & his students from U. of Sheffield. Cite: Ferreira & Vlachos (2016) &
Augenstein et al. (2016). We considered targeting the truth labeling task for
the FNC-1, but without giving teams any labeled training data. We decided
against it both because we thought a competition with a more traditionally
structured Machine learning tasks would appeal to more teams, and because such
an open-ended truth labeling competition was recently completed, called the
Fast & Furious Fact Check Challenge. Our discussions with human fact checkers
lead us to believe that a solution to the stance detection problem could form
the basis of a useful tool for real-life human fact checkers. Also see, next
question/answer.

thats a _substantially_ more thought out approach to the problem than
Wikitribune.

------
barking
This reminds me of the famous Huey Long quote:

"One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government -
and they aren't going to like it."

If there ever is a 'paper' that publishes the full unvarnished un-redacted
truth about everything, it will have very many enemies, some of them very
powerful.

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

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

~~~
tmalsburg2
That's actually explained in the video. Wales says that news media don't have
the resources to produce high-quality output because the competition for
clicks is so fierce. WikiTribune addresses this in two ways: First, they don't
participate in said competition for clicks because they won't run on ads but
donations. In other words, their customer is the reader who has an interest in
quality. Second, they recruit citizen journalists who can help produce
articles that a traditional news business would not be able to afford. Just
paraphrasing. Watch the video.

~~~
anothercomment
I don't think money is the issue. Journalists have their own agenda and tweak
and omit accordingly.

~~~
trendoid
There is barely any human on this planet without an agenda. Not sure what your
point is. Is it that we should stop trying new experiments with news because
some humans are involved?

~~~
anothercomment
No, they shouldn't claim they are better and have no agenda. My point is these
projects are bound to fail.

Of course they will be "helpful" to some - after all, everybody picks some
sources they trust. So if you feel you can trust the WikiThingie, then I guess
it is helpful to you. Just don't make any glorious claims about beating fake
news.

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

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

~~~
rand005
> Wales, who sits on the board of Guardian Media Group, the Guardian’s parent
> company, founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, before donating the
> entire project to a non-profit organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, that
> he set up in 2003.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia-
founder-jimmy-wales-to-fight-fake-news-with-new-wikitribune-site)

------
alva
"Facts can be presented with bias, taken out of context and most recently a
lot of facts are just plain…made-up. Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring
that that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can
verify."

Honourable aims for this project, however once you are literally only
reporting the presented facts (without bias - aka opinion) surely you are just
a Wire Service?

~~~
splawn
we need more "just a wire service" please

~~~
alva
absolutely. it is just that WikiTribune is not presenting itself that way at
all

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

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

~~~
cooper12
Except a _Nature_ study comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica
found them comparable in accuracy. [0] It's also funny that you think a lot of
news hasn't already reached that point.

[0]: [https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-
bri...](https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/)

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

~~~
tmalsburg2
Nothing is ever completely bulletproof. The real question is whether this is
better than or a useful addition to the more traditional news media. I think
there is a good chance that it will be.

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

~~~
tmalsburg2
I managed to make a recurring donation after two attempts.

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

~~~
xur17
Ran into the same issue. I received a purchase notification from my credit
card, but now I don't know if I donated or not...

------
dayaz36
The premise that the news was truthful before the internet and we need to go
back to having gatekeepers is comical

------
fs111
How is a 28 year old fashion model exactly going to advise them on anything
related to journalism?

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

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

------
krmbzds
I would support it if it weren't down.

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

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

------
soufron
Lily Cole is an advisor against fake news?

~~~
spearo77
I'd never heard of her, so I read about her on Wikipedia[0].. the
impossible.com involvement seems relevant to this.

[0]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole#Business_activities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole#Business_activities))

~~~
bshimmin
Somehow she managed to find time to get a double first from Cambridge whilst
also being really pretty and an actress, so I think that probably at least
slightly qualifies her for some vague element of credibility.

~~~
hartsdown
Since 'History is a Myth' and she has a double 1st in Art History then I guess
she is qualified

------
redsummer
Wikipedia was the original fake news. For instance, someone might edit an
article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else
might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having
read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on
Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and
everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the
plughole. The entropic heat death of information.

I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are
now disasters. Full of bowdlerisation, inconsistent style, and false snippets
of information. I think the abusive nature of many Wikipedia admins, and the
hostility of Wikipedia itself to knowledge, will eventually just make it a
4chan with pretentions.

------
known
truth != fact

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

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

