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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?
takyon: A SoylentNews expert asked, "Whatever happened to Wikinews?"
[Ed. Note: updated at 19:20 with more information]
More coverage: (compiled by butthurt)
Fortune
Daily Mail
Nieman Foundation
The Atlantic
The Guardian
Silicon UK
Press Association 2017 via Clydebank Post
AFP via The Peninsula
(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.