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His goal is for Wikitribune to offer "factual and neutral" articles that help combat the problem of "fake news".
The service is intended to be both ad-free and free-to-read, so will rely on supporters making regular donations.
One expert said it had the potential to become a trusted site, but suggested its influence might be limited.
Wikitribune shares many of the features already found in Mr Wales's online encyclopaedia, including the need for writers to detail the source of each fact and a reliance on the public to edit articles to keep them accurate.
However, while anybody can make changes to a page, they will only go live if a staff member or trusted community volunteer approves them.
The other big difference is that the core team of writers will be paid, although there may also be instances in which a volunteer writes the initial draft and then a staff member edits it.
Wikipedia has built a trustworthy reputation. Can it be transferred to journalism?
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[Ed. Note: updated at 19:20 with more information]
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:33PM (7 children)
The definition of "Fake" is pretty clear:
fake
noun
Definition of fake
: one that is not what it purports to be: such as
a : a worthless imitation passed off as genuine The signature was a fake.
b : impostor, charlatan He told everyone that he was a lawyer, but he was just a fake.
c : a simulated movement in a sports contest (as a pretended kick, pass, or jump or a quick movement in one direction before going in another) designed to deceive an opponent
d : a device or apparatus used by a magician to achieve the illusion of magic in a trick
Just 'cause a certain dumbass is trying to newspeak it into meaninglessness doesn't mean we should let him.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:12PM (5 children)
I mean this in the sense of treating the concept of "fake news" as defined by Trump and his cultists only as if it were a legitimate issue. Fake news very well may be a problem. But it's quoted because this is something they apply to everything dissenting up to and including wikileaks.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:44PM (4 children)
I was, and still am, extremely confused by what fake news actually is.
To me, it is abundantly clear to be information constructed and imparted by individuals wholly divested of the truth in order to create parody or deliberate misinformation. Jon Stewart is a very famous purveyor of fake news. The difference between Jon and a Facebook post during this election, is that Russia was creating the Facebook posts in order to push information as fact in accordance with an agenda to shift public perception. All Jon ever did was attempt to entertain, and no reasonable person could misconstrue much of what he said as fact. It was satire.
Fake news sounds exactly like something the CIA would do. Reminds of a M.A.S.H episode where the doctors defuse a bomb that turned out to be a propaganda drop by the CIA.
For that matter, Fox News is ENTIRELY Fake News by their own admissions. They are an entertainment company, not a news company, and have often compared themselves to the Daily Show and others in that light. Until they want to act like a news organization, and then they act as if they are journalists of the highest integrity.
Fake News is easy enough to counteract, but would require that people are actually capable of reviewing sources, performing research, and engaging in critical thinking. Unfortunately, for most of America they have very little skills to determine what is real news and what is fake news.
As long as I was vilifying Hillary, some people would actually believe there is a child pedophilia ring involving the royals around the world headquartered in the basement of a popular pizza shop. That was fake news taken as literal fact by an awful lot of people when it should of failed the sniff test in the first round.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:56PM
What really floored me about #pizzagate is that when I went to review the supposed evidence, I was confronted by something that looked like it was written by somebody with Something Awful, meant purely to be parody of conspiracy theories a la National Treasure. I still find myself shocked that people took it seriously, especially people who should know damned well better and "lurk moar."
I'm still convinced that it was an elaborate "loli haet pizza" joke that got out of hand, but I can't blame whatever b-tard came up with it for the dipshits who took it seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @06:26AM (2 children)
The meaning of fake news is unclear simply because of how it started.
'Fake News' was an orchestrated attempt by old or establishment media to discredit everybody else. You can even see just about the exact date they came up with the idea [google.com] - sometime early November of last year where it goes from a non-word to everywhere. Their intent was to attribute genuine absurdity like Alex Jones to everything that was not them. There were a couple of major problems with this. The first is that old media was attacking not only things like Alex Jones, but also outlets like The Intercept [theintercept.com], which is really little more than old media done right.
The problem is the next one and what I think resulted in one of the biggest backfires of organized PR in some time. They decided to call everything fake news near the same time they started running stories like 'PissGate.' PissGate was almost immediately labeled fakenews by many people simply because of how absurd it seemed and the fact it was based on 0 evidence - just a lengthy unsubstantiated dossier by what was initially an anonymous source. It got tremendous coverage. Many believed the president was set to be imminently impeached or even arrested. Nonetheless, it indeed turned out to be completely unsupported. Now all the 'FakeNews' labels attached to companies like CNN just gained a huge boost of immediately visible credibility. I think their (old media) perhaps even bigger mistake was then doubling down. Okay, PissGate might not be the clipper but they hung onto the Trump-Russia connections hard and parroted every single angle and bit they could find, as if they were breaking the next Watergate - only bigger. And as it becomes increasingly clear that no such meaningful connection exists, it's also becoming increasingly clear that old media is increasingly becoming the 'fake news.'
That doesn't mean Alex Jones is suddenly any less insane. People aren't elevating genuinely fake news, but all news that CNN reports is now being subject to the same scrutiny as him. And that is really a good thing. News, from any source, should never be taken at face value. So what is fake news? More than a thing, I think it's an era. It's people coming to formally accept that you can't expect any company to tell you the truth when there's so much more to be gained by telling you something other than the truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @06:59AM (1 child)
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/26/lawmakers-suggest-former-trump-aide-flynn-broke-us-law.html [foxnews.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @08:28AM
Right. And we've gone from PissGate and 'Trump is a Russian plant' to imminent impeachment (or even arrest) of the president to 'aid might have broken some law by not reporting a $33k payment on form for services rendered from a Russian media company.'
This whole thing is dying faster than the Obama citizenship conspiracy and has just about as much substance. News sites will continue reporting on it because they need clicks and drama gets clicks. And perhaps that also cuts to the root of the problem. These articles are invariably hyperbolic, poorly (if at all) sourced, and poorly written. But that's okay, so long as they confirm the biases of enough people they'll get those clicks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:20AM
The definition of "Fake" is pretty clear:
The best definition I've heard for "Fake News" was by Tom Nichols [wikipedia.org]. In a presentation at The Heritage Foundation to discuss his book [c-span.org], The Death of Expertise [wikipedia.org].
He says (starting around 01:27:00) [c-span.org]:
The entire presentation is actually quite good. I haven't yet gotten his book, but I think it will be among the next few I read.
tl;dr (Nichols has some choice things to say about "tl;dr" too!): Fake news is an intentional lie. Full Stop.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr