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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
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.