Slashdot Mirror
Is a "Wikipedia For News" Feasible?
Larry Sanger writes: Online news has become ridiculously confusing. Interesting bits are scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, and other noise. Besides, there's so much interesting news, but we just don't have time for it all. Automated tools help a little, but give us only an unreliable selection; we still feel like we're missing out. Y'know, back in the 1990s, we used to have a similar problem about general knowledge. Locating answers to basic questions through the noise of the Internet was hit-and-miss and took time. So we organized knowledge with Wikipedia ("the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"). Hey, why don't we do something similar for the news? Is it possible to make a Wikipedia for news, pooling the efforts of newshounds everywhere? Could such a community cut through the noise and help get us caught up more quickly and efficiently? As co-founder of Wikipedia, I'm coming down on the "yes" side. I have recently announced an open content, collaborative news project, Infobitt (be gentle, Slashdot! We are still in early stages!), and my argument for the affirmative position is made both briefly and at length.
Isn't this already a thing?
The probable most obvious question is how will that project differentiate itself from Wikinews?
Isn't that what we're reading now?
Nonsense. I take Drudge Report and Slashdot as the news-sites of record — and I have not missed anything important yet. Thank you very much.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I use Google News as my home page. It's constantly updated, the selection of news is pretty good, and they offer multiple links to each story. On the downside, there are occasionally articles that are paywalled or click-bait that makes it through the filter, but it is what it is. It's pretty good for a no-humans-involved system.
I once spent six months in a foreign country. Upon returning home I was amazed to read major American newspapers and to see for myself how drastically what they were reporting was different than what was actually going on. I knew what I had experienced first hand, and I knew that what the American papers were reporting was flat out not true. (I still don't know what to make of this since it wasn't just one paper, but all the ones I looked at. I'm no conspiracy nut, but how does that happen?). However, the foreign news such as the BBC was reporting the news accurately. Since then I've not trusted anything reported by American papers, after all, if I know that they were mis-reporting something I knew about, how do I know the truth about things I don't know about first hand? I stick to foreign based news nowadays. Fortunately with the internet that is easy to do.
Google News. Period. Does it for me
Solved by Google News, Trending Topics, Aware friends and followers, Flip Book, A collection of mainstream newsies for breaking news sites, mac rumors. Slashdot is about 24 hours behind many of the news stories that end up here. But you're just being lazy if you feel you need to goad others into providing you yet another news feed.
I find I reliably get most of my news, and fast, from fark.com. Beats bbcnews (ok), yahoo (sucks), cnn (ok), and abcnews (ok) consistently.
you (or we) don't allow Government to get its regulatory paws on it as a journalistic source - because that means they can control what goes out, like every other regulated news agency out there. What's left at the moment are fringe agencies who have given such regulators as ATVOD the big fuck-you biscuit, like UKColumn and TPV. These are what a lot of people (read: sheep, for you populists) would term lunatic agencies yet you tools completely trust the BBC, Daily Mail, etc - two State-controlled agencies that respectively told us that Tower 7 had collapsed (23 minutes BEFORE it fell on its own footprint) and that living is bad for us. I would rather trust an agency that offers the first hand evidence - such as UKC and RT (I know, it's controlled by Moscow but they cover UK stories the BBC won't touch which is fine by me but they do get the facts rather than rely on op-eds from random Government copier monkeys from the Department of Redundancy). Perhaps I'm a little biased in recommending the UKColumn because I do regularly send them information (no I don't get paid by them).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Not a fan of the interface/UI at all. Hopefully that would get cleaned up. It just seems to.. shotgunned and when you click a link, the pop up that shows multiple things doesn't really tell you what the crap it's about. Is it suppose to be "talking points" in the article being referenced? On all the ones I've tried, clicking any of the "talking points" takes me to the same article...
I can say at this point, if the layout doesn't get cleaned up a bit and make more sense, I'll be sticking to slashdot.org, drudge, and Google News
I welcome another source, but it isn't clear that you'll have much impact on available content. Most news is just noise. Everybody has the same stories at the same time it seems I think partly because the average reader's attention span isn't there to focus on deeper analysis, but deeper analysis is expensive in terms of author time and someone who spends two months researching a story worth telling rightly wants to get paid for it. There is value in the tidbits we passively consume on a daily basis, but it would be nice to broaden access to serious journalism from different sources around the globe and hopefully increase the amount of serious in depth pieces published. Maybe the site could create a financial incentive for independent content creators who produce unbiased coverage of social significance.
What role did Slashdot play in Wikipedia? I assume we aren't supposed to take that statement literally?
I thought everything2 was "the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
It seems as if there is some historical revisionism going on. My understanding is that Larry Sanger was a guiding light behind NuPedia, a web encyclopedia that was to be written by experts and vetted by authorities--and that after several years of work, only a few hundred articles were completed.
Wikipedia was started as a side-project and rapidly outpaced NuPedia. Sanger acknowledged its success but regretted Wikipedia's failure to value expertise, and proceeded to launch a new project, Citizendium, which has struggled and sputtered and currently survives with about 20,000 articles and relatively little prominence.
While Jimmy Wales acknowledges Sanger as a co-founder of Wikipedia, and has said that Sanger created many of the policies that to which Wales credits Wikipedia's success, nevertheless it seems a little disingenuous for Sanger to emphasize "Wikipedia."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
No.
I read a bunch of news sites and its easy to see if they are left or right leaning. Wikipedia isnt balanced anymore. There are paid editors who are very left, and the majority is left, feminist and social justice leaning. They can bend any topic to fit a narrative which is damn annoying for a fact based article when its riddle with emotional propaganda.
Just google gamergate and wikipedia, editor ryulong is the perfect example. https://encyclopediadramatica....
Love watching news on youtube, the young turks network is pretty good. I like to play the TYT drinking game, take a shot every time they blame a republican or mention gun control.
An example??? Why leave it up to me you doubter? Ok here's why; as the old saying goes "He who controls the media controls the people" Whether its not reporting all the facts or painting a rosy scene, it's lies. Don't ask for proof, sheep. Naaaah. Calling someone a "Coward" or "cowardly act" does not UNmake you one mr president. Just read or watch the BBC and draw your own conclusions. We ALMOST tell the truth...to be fair. No wonder we have lost all credibility in the world, except to maybe the GOP (Go On & Pee.) Like can you believe a cop who has a legal right to tell you anything that MIGHT help him convict you? Now I ALWAYS listen to both sides and believe me find the 'truth' somewhere in between the lines.
What role did Slashdot play in building Wikipedia? Sounds like hyperbole, pretty typical for U.S. news media, I suppose.
Same story was on Hacker News last week. From the same guy.
Hey, in my enthusiasm, I pledged a thingy.
Then I saw .com and didn't see an ownership model. Is this a private company (hence seed round), or is it a community owned property?
That frankly makes a huge difference in my contribution. Cool idea though. News is total shit these days.
Mike
As Taleb Nassim says (I'm probably mis-quoting), we spend too much time reading the little bits and pieces of news. (Ref Black Swan). We should be looking at the bigger picture, everything day-to-day is just noise. Oil is up! Oil is down! Still, hard to break the habit.
So is the question do I want a news source that ...
... tempting ...
1. Shouldn't be considered 100% reliable
2. Is hacked by people on both sides of the issue to try and squelch bad publicity
3. Is kept up to date by a bunch of volunteers while a small group of execs and programmers feast upon millions in "donations" to keep it "ad free"
Hmmm
NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s.
This is a topic many of us love to read about, but it is just not news, it was at the top of Infobitt. News is something that when your spouse waves you to the TV to see something huge your able to give more backstory than Wolf Blitzer. News is something that gets you to shout "HEY O M F G". News unfortunately bleeds. News is, well new. Seems unlikely to be generated by casual social media chat.
The issue with online news isn't that the interesting bits are hard to find. It's that everyone has different interesting bits, there's a ton of duplicated content, and it's hard to follow issues and tell when something new has happened. Plus crowdsourcing is going to be tough when you're following a moving target of quickly developing events.
I think a much cooler idea would be to arrange the facts in a timeline as stories develop across weeks and months. Basically a fancier version of timelines on Wikipedia with better visualizations. When you notice a story you could hop over and get a simple overview of the coverage, and if you're following a story over a period of time you could routinely hop over and see the main events that occurred.
I stole this Sig
Dose Of News - www.doseofnews.com
Perhaps because, like me, he's lived and traveled extensively overseas and has no idea what you're talking about.
American news outlets have peculiarly American biases. But foreign news outlets have their own biases, and because American culture is such an out-sized influence, foreign biases are often driven indirectly by American biases--contradiction is often mistook for a more critical assessment.
But in the vast majority of cases these are biases of emphasis and editorial discretion. Rarely are the _facts_ incorrect in the Western media (by Western I mean industrialized countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia). Usually the problem with the facts is that they're missing. And that's because journalism is hard, and unlike fringe news sites or state-controlled media in the rest of the world, professional Western media _tends_ to err by omission rather than choosing to promulgate outright lies. That's objectively an improvement. When The People's Daily or Russia Today emphatically states some fact that contradicts the impression in the Western media, they're not being bold, they're usually being dangerously flippant or politically manipulative. Western media will leave out suspect facts and paper it over with editorial fluff. Again, that's definitely a better approach, especially for the historical record. But to the conspiracy-minded it can make it seem like they're trying to hide stuff from you, rather than simply hide the fact that they don't know the whole story.
We are heading into the Wall Street style of news. Wall Street frequently responds to speculation, which to them is news, but really in the end is manipulation.
News needs to be vetted before being posted as news. Otherwise, we are heading to more stock market style news and a lot of noise. Of course, information is power and misinformation means there's money to be made...
New short life makes things complicated: crowd wisdom is able to make wikipedia articles good, but it takes time. If we try to use the same method for news, it will be obsolete once verified.
The New York Times is the single most popular news source on Twitter, followed by a fifth of all world leaders, according to the latest Twiplomacy analysis by the global PR firm Burson-Marsteller.
The @NYTimes Twitter account is followed by almost 22% of the 647 world leaders and is ahead of @Reuters, @CNNbrk @TheEconomist and the @BBCWorld Twitter accounts.
Burson-Marsteller’s analytics team analyzed the most followed Twitter accounts by the 647 heads of state and government and ministers of foreign affairs and their institutions on Twitter.
The 20 Most Followed Journalists' by World Leaders on Twitter
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof are the three most popular journalists followed by world leaders.
http://twiplomacy.com/blog/world-leaders-get-their-news-from-the-new-york-times-reuters-cnn-and-the-economist/
If anything, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that Kuro5hin built.
"He who does not work shall not eat," is a core principle of Lenin's version of socialism. Actually, it's one of the problems with the development of socialism: when there isn't sufficient work, loads of people die.
Actually, its from the Bible - 2 Thessalonians 3:10
I don't know what translation you're looking at, but the NIV has "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat", and the NWT has "If anyone does not want to work, neither let him eat." There's a big difference between "does not work" and "is unwilling to work". This includes things like a lack of demand for labor, as grandparent AC mentioned. It also includes a disability that interferes with finding and performing a job; see recent stories about the importance of social skills leading to un- and under-employment among autistics.
This was 20 years ago so I don't know if I could find specific news stories today, but I had been in the middle east and the things the US papers were reporting about the Palestinians were flat out lies. I was frankly astonished. Before this I was naive and believed that newspapers were reputable and reliable.
Ah. Stuff like how the international press coverage is anti-Israel. Israel isn't likely to cut off your head for bad press.
Larry, despite your pandering, the answer is yes. No, I don't particularly care to visit your site. You and Jimbo are both elitists that I don't care to associate with.
It can be done, though. As you mention, there are some key issues:
-Timeliness
-Noise
The standard motivator for overcoming those is cash. The reason Wikipedia works to the extent it does is because the noise can be overcome by the central limit theorem. Timeliness can't be overcome in that manner; you need a different interaction protocol. Whatever it is, that protocol needs to be better than 50% accurate on first pass. That means you'll need something to instill trust. And since the trust model on the interwebs is still immature, unless you are introducing a new one, you'll come up short. In order to introduce a new one, you either need compelling content, or compelling technology. I'm betting you have neither.
Hope you prove me wrong.
It's called The Associated Press.
http://www.newslines.org/ exists to aggregate news in a timeline by SUBJECT, where the subject could be a person, place, event etc.
It does fill a niche that I think is not really covered well by wikipedia, google news, or any of the services I've yet seen.
*disclaimer, newslines.org is a startup of a good friend of mine and I do have a financial interest.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Does anyone care to fill me in on why Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"? I've been visiting here since approximately the time of Wikipedia's ascension, but don't recall any link other than both being somewhat nerdy and popular among the same groups.
Who wouldn't want a news stream that thinks porn stars and manga characters are right up there in importance with world politics and science, but local events and locations are not notable enough to be mentioned?
For all its goods, WP has many downsides as well and in a news stream, they would come out more strongly and more visibly, because they wouldn't be hidden under layers of administrative control, aggressive editing and irrelevance.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The first hurdle is the Western obsession with "objective" reporting. No such thing exists. But in the pursuit of the appearance of objectivity, you get slanted news constantly disguising itself as authoritative truth. Sometimes you get the same phenomenon on Wikipedia but at least there, interpretation of data is kept to a minimum. There is so much to report on, and so much information to curate, one has to employ a particular world view to decide what part of the story is important to tell. When it comes to news, there is no way to avoid ideological siloing. A single 'wikipedia of news" is not possible, but maybe several of them, each devoted to a certain way of understanding events, is possible.
Infobit...Infobutt...Infomutt...Infroggut...Afrogat...Afoghat....Awogbat....
News are short lived and should be delivered as fast as possible, it is not something that is refined over time like a Wikipedia article.
Moreover, news are very personal. Are you interested in sports ? what sport ? what team ? and fashion ? and video games ? It's nice to have a listing of what most "editors" think are important news but I don't necessarily have the same interests. There are systems that can help you getting the most relevant news for you but that's more a Google-like job than a Wikipedia-like job.
And it's not like community-based news sites are a new thing : digg, reddit and even the *chans... Except these look not at all like a wiki.
Isn't this already a thing [wikinews.org] ?
Already a thing
Irrelevant perhaps, but that doesn't mean it won't be popular, at least among certain demographics.
After all, if it comes to reflect their biases more the longer they use it, they'll be more and more likely to want to get their news from there.
So from that perspective, it sounds like a win for those selling the ads on it, and a depressing loss for the rest of humanity.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
...not make the same mistakes we made with Wikipedia?
1) People editing X should have some knowledge of X
2) If a person Y complains and corrects an article about Y it should be automatically dismissed. This has happened to me, twice and others who are actually well known.
I signed up, it's a great idea.
Need Mercedes parts ?
About two months ago I launched a web app that's just like Wikipedia for news, but where events are linked together by their causes and effects:
causemap.org
Anybody can edit it, and make links between situations based on their causality. For example:
What do you think? Could this do the trick? I published a 3-minute introduction to it on Medium