Yahoo – AFP,
Rob Lever, April 25, 2017
 |
| Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, pictured in 2016, hopes to tackle fake news with WikiTribune |
Wikipedia
founder Jimmy Wales is launching a project aimed at reshaping the news media --
and tackling the scourge of misinformation -- using the same collaborative
principles as the revolutionary online encyclopedia.
Wikitribune
will rely on a broad online community of journalists and readers as fact
checkers, a crowdsourcing model pioneered in the "wiki" system behind
Wikipedia.
"The
news is broken and we can fix it," reads the website of the project
unveiled by Wales late Monday, describing itself as focused on
"evidence-based journalism."
On Twitter,
Wales called it "a news platform that brings journalists & volunteers
together for fact-based articles with real impact."
"Wikitribune
takes professional, standards-based journalism and incorporates the radical
idea from the world of Wiki that a community of volunteers can and will
reliably protect and improve articles."
The new service
will be free, without advertising, relying on contributions from users in the
same manner as the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia.
It will ask
supporters to subscribe for $15 per month and plans to hire at least 10
journalists to manage the site.
Wales told
the BBC: "I think we're in a world right now where people are very
concerned about making sure we have high quality fact-based information, so I
think there will be demand for this."
Fake news
emerged as a serious issue during last year's US election campaign, when
clearly fraudulent stories circulated virally on social media, potentially
swaying some voters.
Concerns
have been raised since then about hoaxes and misinformation affecting elections
in Europe; and internet firms have stepped up efforts to crack down on
"click farms" and other systems that generate online ad revenue using
made-up news stories.
Need for
innovation
Jeff
Jarvis, a City University of New York journalism professor who is an advisor to
the project, said in a blog post he is "excited" about Wikitribune.
"I see
the need for innovation around new forms of news," Jarvis said.
"The
community of contributors will vet the facts, help make sure the language is
factual and neutral, and will to the maximum extent possible be transparent
about the source of news posting full transcripts, video, and audio of
interviews."
Wikitribune's
advisory group includes Jarvis, venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki and British
actress Lily Cole, according to the website.
Jeff Howe,
a journalist who coined the term crowdsourcing and now is a professor at
Northeastern University, said this system can be positive for the news
industry.
"I'm a
big fan of crowdsourced verification," Howe told AFP. "It's a very
well-tested principle."
Howe added
that crowdsourcing at Wikipedia and elsewhere works best as a
"hybrid" system, which is open to the public but with professionals
managing the system.
But Howe
said it remains unclear if Wikitribune can reach the people who are most susceptible
to fraudulent news.
"Some
people have already written off the mainstream media," he said. "I'm
not sure if he (Wales) can reach those people in the margins."
Laura
Hazard Owen, deputy editor of Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab, said
it remains to be seen if the project will succeed.
"Good
things can happen when a crowd goes to work on trying to figure out a problem
in journalism," she said in a blog post.
"At
the same time, completely crowdsourced news investigations can go bad without
oversight... An entirely crowdsourced investigation with nobody to oversee it
or pay for it will probably go nowhere."
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