WikiTribune – Evidence-based journalism

462 点作者 spearo77大约 8 年前

40 条评论

Animats大约 8 年前

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] <a href="https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikitribune.com/terms-of-use/</a> [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case</a>

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jim-jim-jim大约 8 年前

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.

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RandyRanderson大约 8 年前

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!

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kristianc大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

> 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大约 8 年前

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] <a href="http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news/" rel="nofollow">http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-ar...</a>

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clarkmoody大约 8 年前

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.

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sid-kap大约 8 年前

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.

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aphextron大约 8 年前

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?

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spearo77大约 8 年前

Seems to be overloaded right now, but I found their campaign video via search in Vimeo<a href="https://vimeo.com/214586867" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/214586867</a>

spiderfarmer大约 8 年前

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] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Correspondent</a>

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anigbrowl大约 8 年前

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.

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rodionos大约 8 年前

If this ends up being the same as data journalism, it would be great.- <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail</a> - home of ... data journalism- <a href="https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892" rel="nofollow">https://careers.bloomberg.com/job/detail/47892</a> - seeking a ... data journalist- <a href="https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips" rel="nofollow">https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/deidre-mcphillips</a> - ... is a data reporter

gkoberger大约 8 年前

Site's down, but here's an article about it: <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-launches-wikitribune-news-by-the-people-and-for-the-people/" rel="nofollow">http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wal...</a>

andrewla大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

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.

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empressplay大约 8 年前

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"...

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mcculley大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

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 supportersThe 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.

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barking大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

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

anothercomment大约 8 年前

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.

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RhysU大约 8 年前

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

resist_futility大约 8 年前

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

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alva大约 8 年前

"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?

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hartsdown大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

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.

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saurabhn大约 8 年前

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.

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JumpCrisscross大约 8 年前

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

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killjoywashere大约 8 年前

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...

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dayaz36大约 8 年前

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

fs111大约 8 年前

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

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davidlago大约 8 年前

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

krmbzds大约 8 年前

I would support it if it weren't down.

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lips大约 8 年前

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

soufron大约 8 年前

Lily Cole is an advisor against fake news?

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redsummer大约 8 年前

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大约 8 年前

truth != fact

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spullara大约 8 年前

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