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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.
and there seem to be quite a lot of other projects like this, for example - https://grasswire.com/
one issue might be that news are more interesting for various parties to push their agenda. a wikipedia article can be used to shift perception, but it is likely to be corrected. a fake news item, even if later corrected, will have impact on the perception of the viewers.
as an example, grasswire covers russian-ukrainian war, and it gets very slanted messages through every now and then.
Rich
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.
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!
And he got the same hard questions there - with lame responses that show this isn't even half thought-out.
It is bothering me that I have to even sign up to view anything on Infobitt.com. That already is sending me away since I refuse to blindly sign up for any service.
Ditto.
I have of course wondered what it would be like to do Infobitt with a wiki, and I considered setting a wiki up for that purpose. The bottom line is that wikis lack the potential reasons for using the Infobitt format in the first place--making it easier to compete as well as collaborate, making it possible to vote on small pieces of content (as well as the ordering of the content), etc.
In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
Contests? Welcome to Facebook games meets the news.
lsanger 9 days ago | link
Battling organized partisanship is a problem for down the road. My hope is that, by the time we deal with that, we'll have the funding and the personnel to code up a system that enables us to test out some technical solutions to this problem. There are lots of ideas...
Shouldn't this be figured out before, and not "down the road?"
We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community.
So why not some more (or at least SOME) info on the financial model???? It's obviously for-profit.
Another complaint about login being required:
But why you need people to log in to see about page? Just 1 static html page so I (not really me, because I spent a lot of time on that conversation anyway, but somebody, whatever) could decide if it's worth my time to sign up using real email account. It's, well, the point of about pages, to explain people what is that stuff they are looking at, and if they really want to go further. Scalability issues? That 1 static html page could be hosted anywhere, and, besides, if your servers aren't dying to host login page it wouldn't make very much difference anyway.
We need to code the "like" feature as the first step to implementing this.
After more than a year and basic features missing?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another
If that's what you think, you are reading/watching/listening to the wrong news outlets. It's the same reaction I have when I hear people say "there's no good music anymore" - that's completely untrue. If the radio isn't playing the stuff you like, there are lots of other places you can find good stuff if you just invest the time to look.
There are plenty of high quality news organizations out there today which are dedicated to providing an even-handed, responsible professional journalism. It's true that, as was famously once said, "the only truly objective journalism is sports box scores." And you can - especially if you are looking for it - find some degree of bias in anything. But there's a 180 degree gap from the minor and inadvertent bias you may find in an Associated Press, BBC World, New York Times (or even Al Jazeera - the American not Qatari version) article versus the intentional bias you find in a FOX News or Huffington Post story.
To your previous point, though, I agree that bias-free reporting is not necessarily dull but is - by design - afraid to answer the "why" of the "Five W's" for fear of losing balance. I try to mix my news reading between (generally) unbiased news from NYT or BBC with biased but (from my viewpoint) more insightful sources like The Economist or Slate.
However, I am strongly opposed to the frequent Slashbot trope that "there is no professional journalism left, it's all biased" and hence there is in general no credibility gap between what the NY Times prints in its newspaper about the Ruble crisis vs. what "iwantputinsbaby07" posts to Twitter. Professional journalism is real, and it will always have a place of preferential credibility to unknown sources with unknown motivations. Meanwhile, slanted journalism will still probably generate the most clicks - but at least if you're picking your news sources to be pre-sorted to agree with your opinions, you know what you're buying.
"95% of all Slashdot
I'm a journalist. After looking at your samples http://larrysanger.org/wp-cont... http://larrysanger.org/wp-cont... I was wondering what the benefit is of Infobitt over Google News.
You had an Ebola story. I would define the task as gathering information, verifying it, identifying the important issues and organizing it. By that definition, I think the New York Times did a pretty good job. I got most of my information about it from Science magazine and New England Journal of Medicine. (The trade press covers stories with an order of magnitude more detail, they understand it better, and they know better how to identify the important issues and organize it.)
Jon Cohen did a lot of the Ebola coverage for Science. He covered the AIDS epidemic, wrote one of the leading books about it, and covered several other major epidemics around the world in the kind of detail Science magazine's PhD-level readers want to know. He has a salary that's enough to live comfortably and an expense account that can send him around the world. I can't imagine how crowd-sourced volunteers could ever deliver information about Ebola as well as Cohen could.
I could say the same for New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Reuters, and several other news sources. The big difference I notice is that your Bitt is a miscellaneous collection of stories, some of which is unverified bullshit, like Darrell Issa's pointless partisan attacks on Obama. There were easily 100 major stories on the Ebola quarantine that day. Why did you pick those 8?
If I were giving a journalism class, I would say, "A news story has to have a story."
There's a fire hose of information out there. The first job of a journalist is to throw out 99% of it. Then throw out another 90%. Then try to make some sense out of it.
For example, JAMA last week had 8 or 9 articles on the theme of reforming health care delivery.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/is... Each of those articles illustrated one important aspect of the problem, and they all fit in together. They deliberately had one article that contradicts another article.
Sorry to be so tough but that's the way editors treated me, and that's the way I treat reporters today. It's for their own good.