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

~~~
ANTSANTS
Interesting. How do you plan to keep coverage unbiased? A lot of bias manages
to sneak into Wikipedia articles on current events in spite of their community
guidelines and moderation.

~~~
lsanger
The fact that bitt and fact order, as well as which fact is displayed to the
reader, is (or will soon be) subject to vote will provide a moderating
influence, I hope.

The reason Wikipedia articles are often biased is that people in authority in
the community simply do not respect the neutrality policy. Even if most
Wikipedians and most readers would prefer things to be more balanced, those in
de facto control of an article determine the article's degree of bias. If the
wording and order of facts is determined by open public vote, my hypothesis is
that there will be more of a moderating effect.

~~~
briandear
However it would depend on who is doing the voting. If you, for example, used
Twitter to gauge political sentiment, you'd be representing x% of the majority
position, which would introduce a selection bias that would imply that x%
represent the views of everyone. The problems with Wikipedia for controversial
topics Ali's that typically both sides are highly motivated to "win" whereas
those that aren't so motivated probably have the correct answer.

------
sparkzilla
It's not only feasible, we are already doing it! [1] I have also written
extensively on why Wikipedia is not a newspaper [2] and the many flaws of
Wikipedia for news-based content [2]

Larry's attempt to break down the news into bits is an interesting experiment
(and I wish him the best of luck as he goes forward). I'm not sure he will be
able to attract the user base he needs to make it work though. We pay our
writers, and are moving to implementing a revenue-share model to reward our
writers. I'm not sure if the "work-for-free-while-the-owners-get-rich model
works any more.

[1][http://newslines.org](http://newslines.org)
[2][http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-
newspaper/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/)
[3][http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-
sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

~~~
lsanger
I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation
models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for
now); we summarize (and can rearrange) individual facts from many sources
instead of making one narrative per story written by one person; and you don't
rank the news in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell (do correct me if
I'm wrong, but I don't see how).

We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun,
and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete
with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering
doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have
on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a
login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular
participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid
writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock
to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with
Wikipedia...

~~~
sparkzilla
Thanks Larry. I think breaking down the info into bits is interesting, it's
something we have been looking into for other parts of our site (not news).
BTW, weren't you paid to create the first 1000 or so Wikipedia articles?

~~~
tyang
Are you at 1000 articles? How's your burn rate?

~~~
sparkzilla
Our writers have added almost 25,000 posts on thousands of topics (a sample
here [http://newslines.org](http://newslines.org)). So far, at $1 a post, that
has cost $25,000. Some of our writers have made thousands of dollars. We just
closed more investment are are building a revenue-share model that will give
our writers even more money. People who get in early, and do consistent work
will be able to make a lot of money.

~~~
lsanger
Yes, may the best model win!

~~~
sparkzilla
There's plenty of room for everyone. Best of luck.

------
fennecfoxen
Isn't that the purpose of [http://en.wikinews.org/](http://en.wikinews.org/)?
What will this site do right that Wikinews doesn't?

~~~
lsanger
"Wikipedia for news" might be a brief statement of the purpose of Wikinews,
but it isn't an attempt to solve the problem I'm concerned to solve. Wikipedia
made encyclopedias better by making a giant encyclopedia. Wikinews didn't make
news better...in any way. What we want to do is actually organize the news,
including the "long tail" of citizen journalism, into "small pieces, loosely
joined" in the form of one-sentence fact summaries. The result will enable a
scalable community to co-author a truly useful, complete, and giant selection
of the news, without the noise and confusion that besets the news today. So
that's the difference.

~~~
briandear
This I could get behind. If you were to strip the adjectives out of the
stories (both literally and figuratively, it would not only remove some of the
inherent bias, but also a lot of the noise. For example: "A police officer
shot a man during an altercation over Lucky Charms in Sometown, California.
The shooting is currently under investigation.

And that's it. You report the facts of the investigation and then the public
has an unbiased view of the facts, without the subtle nuances that introduce
bias. Such as, "A black police officer shot a Vietnamese man. Until the facts
of the case reveal that race was a motive, then those details presumptively
introduce race as a motive. That's the kind of journalism that is successful
financially because it generates strong emotions, and thus viewers however
it's subtly dishonest not because those facts aren't true, but because of the
motivation behind why those facts where included.

------
smoe
I really like the idea of summarizing various source in infobitt. But I think
it still suffers from some points outlined in "News is bad for you – and
giving up reading it will make you happier" [0].

E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty
irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the
personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better
once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable.

The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only
provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly
the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and
later quitted my job at a news site.

Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge
potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my
opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the
distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it.

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-
rol...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli)

~~~
lsanger
The news on the front page looks a little weird because a bunch of new people
from Hacker News just arrived and ranked the news very quickly and sloppily.
So it's OK. In a few days when things have settled down (??), you'll see it's
much more plausible. As for being U.S.-heavy, we will of course have a U.K.
version, other national versions, other languages...but that'll be post-launch
and post-second funding round.

In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news
ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made
possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank
differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted
and what you're shown will be different.

I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you
wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-)

Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard-
launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...

------
hackuser
Less and less do I trust the wisdom of the crowds, and Wikipedia. I want
expertise, not the consensus of amateurs and the ignorant. Look how well the
consensus of experts, or at least professionals, works at HN: useful, better
than alternatives, but I wouldn't bank on it.

A story, possibly apocryphal, about Richard Feynman: He gave a strong negative
review to a textbook that the other reviewers endorsed. When confronted he
said he might not be the smartest person in the world, but was he more
intelligent than the average of a hundred people? Certainly!

Or from a Car Talk brain teaser: Do two people who don't know what they're
talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're
talking about?

What about 100 or 1,000 people? I'm pretty sure they know less, as they create
in their echo chamber greater certainty and additional untruths.

(I am overstating the case for effect; there is value in the aggregate factual
knowledge of crowds, and they are not always ignorant.)

~~~
lsanger
As I have said several times before, Wikipedia doesn't follow Surowiecki's
rules for "wisdom of crowds" effects.

The Infobitt model has an advantage over wikis that will enable a wisdom of
crowds effect. People contribute and vote independently of each other, not by
having to agree on a single version of the content. Yes, there can be
comments, and that will have a biasing effect; but what people say in comments
is obviously not as important as their votes, which they can exercise
independently of each other and comments.

Also, since the pieces of content are short and fungible, they are therefore
capable of being subject to contests. We can submit competing versions of
facts, and the best can rise to the top.

Finally, every fact in Infobitt has to be sourced, and the fact is a summary
of the source; and (soon) we'll be able to compete to write the best summary.
So, to be sure, we'll have bad summaries occasionally, but generally I think
we'll have good ones, once we've built the community up some more.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks for taking the time to answer my, and everyone's questions.

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

~~~
vivooshka
Lots of people do things for free if they feel like they are getting something
out of it. Pay is an incentive, but it is not black and white.

~~~
crdoconnor
What they would be getting out of this still seems to be a bit of a mystery.

~~~
tyang
Not for everyone. Look at Yelp and Wikipedia.

------
hackuser
A much higher proportion of news content than Wikipedia content is
politicized, and Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues.

How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will
you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post?
Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government-
controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)?

It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized
'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is
valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more
dedicated contributors.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues.

It still functions better than most major news outlets do. Usually the only
time I see an article that is _very_ heavily slanted is when it the pet issue
of some particular group or cause (e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_States)
)

Its rules on sources aren't bad at all, it's just implementation which is a
bit dodgy sometimes.

------
frankydp
Feels very much like news.google.com.

With the voting on GN being time and search traffic? I am not sure how the
determination on GN ordering works, but the idea of human curated news seems
an even more sensation driven principle than the current network news
industry.

Even HN falls victim to sensationalism on a regular basis, and I presume most
of HN's users are somewhat invested in the quality.

I am not meaning to detract from the effort, but the outcome for such a
scenario seems pretty repeatable. Especially with the history of non-niche
vote driven news outlets/sites, and their predilection to not be viewed as
quality, definitive, or substantive.

------
skadamat
[http://news.genius.com](http://news.genius.com)

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

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

 _Machines should think. People should work._

~~~
lsanger
No, it's not. I use Google News when trying to figure out how to organize and
summarize the news. Google News isn't very good at ranking news, and it
doesn't even try to summarize the facts in the news.

~~~
hackuser
> Google News isn't very good at ranking news

Is this something Infobitt evaluated or do you mean they don't rank it well
for your personal needs? Also, they do provide 1-2 sentence summaries, but
nothing as detailed as Infobitt.

I happen to think Google ranks news surprisingly well, though not well enough
to be my primary source (I doubt any machine or group of people will beat my
personally selected and organized RSS feeds), but that's only for my needs.
FWIW I don't logon to Google and block most tracking so I'm not sure they
customize it for me.

EDIT: Clarified first paragraph

~~~
stevemeier853
Google news is likely based on algorithms and big data based on user searches
and the # of times articles with keywords are getting selected. Nothing wrong
with that, but far short of what an informed and active community can do. The
two are complementary but quite different.

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

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

~~~
sparkzilla
Are you being paid, or is there a revenue share? If not, I wonder what your
motivation is.

~~~
tyang
Yeah, crazy right?

Folks already contributing hundreds of hours for free for some time.

I can't imagine someone doing free work and writing, ranking restaurant
reviews, editing, citing, writing pieces of encyclopedia entrees or electing
Presidents like in 2008.

Grassroots wha?

~~~
sparkzilla
Getting free contributions works for Wikipedia because it is not a business,
has no ads and it's supported by donations. And because people get ego value
from getting their contributions on a large, popular site. However, if the
intention is to use free content to make the owners (and VCs) rich, then I am
not sure that is a sustainable business model in the long term.

~~~
tyang
Quora and Yelp are for profit.

~~~
sparkzilla
Yes, and their models are unsustainable. I wouldn't be an investor in any
company that uses free labor.

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

~~~
tyang
Yes. The design is far from perfect.

This is just a beta version.

For me, it's already a pretty good way to catch up on the main news fast.

I can pick one bitt and learn some key facts and move on.

Fast, easy, good enough.

Much faster than any alternative.

------
denchik37
Quick googling of news ontologies reveale plenty of established knowledge
models. Why does the world need one more?

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

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

~~~
lsanger
Not really. Google doesn't summarize facts. It aggregates articles into
clusters, which is useful, but it doesn't save us much time. Google also does
a rather poor job of ranking the importance of stories, and often has old news
for a long time and breaking news relatively late (or later than a motivated
community, like Twitter, can have it).

------
lettercarrier
I would love to see this work. Really love to.

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

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

~~~
nl
Is there a link to actually read some stories on the site?

~~~
vivooshka
You can sign up here at infobitt.com.

------
krick
> Is a “Wikipedia for news” feasible?

I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something
important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news",
but there are several reasons why it is empty talking.

First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy
to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more
successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia _is the data_. Newspapers,
TV, now all these news portals are _services_. There is important difference
between data and service.

Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good,
which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you,
disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great
work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not
particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that
you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably)
politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior,
people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like
encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content
which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I
don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian
clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are
about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also
exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about
political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are
interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on
wikipedia.

Service is something to be _delivered_. It must be on time, as "cold news"
aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm
interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it
(no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's
about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I
get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore).
It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more.
That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to
work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little
community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There
are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip
discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about
opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news
service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I
guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are
trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are
making is a problem by itself.

Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other
comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social
networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are
more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't
even see any claims of how different form them it would be.

Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for
them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds
of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking
surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to
their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual
newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real
ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator
like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else.
Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.

~~~
tyang
Did you even read this?

[http://infobitt.com/category/about-
infobitt/b/5762](http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762)

~~~
krick
Ah, my bad. I didn't sign up because I never sign up to i-don't-know-what and
I didn't expect that I will find some "about page" _after_ signing up, which
seems to me like very natural thing to [do not] expect. Unfortunately I can't
follow your link without signing up either, and service that behaves like that
actually makes me inclined to go away and never turn back not matter what. So,
no, I didn't read it, and I admit it very much might be the reason I don't
understand what it is about.

But, still, what I said in the previous post are pretty general statements
which I believe must be true to some degree for every single form of
"wikipedia for news".

~~~
MJHardy
I suspect that after the site undergoes some further improvements, its content
will be made visible to those without accounts (so that you would need an
account to contribute but not to read).

~~~
lsanger
Yes, agreed. There are some issues (mostly having to do with scalability) we
have to sort out before we launch to public view without login.

~~~
krick
But why you need people to log in to see about page? Just 1 static html page
so I (not really me, because I spent a lot of time on that conversation
anyway, but _somebody_ , whatever) could decide if it's worth my time to sign
up using real email account. It's, well, _the point_ of about pages, to
explain people what is that stuff they are looking at, and if they really want
to go further. Scalability issues? That 1 static html page could be hosted
anywhere, and, besides, if your servers aren't dying to host login page it
wouldn't make very much difference anyway.

~~~
tyang
That's a good idea. Hope Larry considers it.

~~~
lsanger
It's certainly something we can consider now that we've soft-launched. We've
thought about it in the past, and now I guess it is a good idea to consider it
again!

------
frozenport
Sounds like Reddit

~~~
tyang
Sounds like you haven't read the quick summary on Infobitt just yet.

[http://infobitt.com/category/about-
infobitt/b/5762](http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762)

------
billconan
hacker news is essentially a wikipedia for tech news.

~~~
tyang
Yes. Also, techmeme.

