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Is a "Wikipedia For News" Feasible?

Posted by Soulskill on from the DIY-journalism dept.

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.

36 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Isn't this already a thing?

    1. Re:I don't get it by richlv · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    2. Re:I don't get it by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

      And I believe the oldest still-operating one is Indymedia, which was founded in the late '90s. It's unapologetically aimed at being activist grassroots media, though, not aiming at event-handed mainstream news coverage.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    3. Re:I don't get it by HBI · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think even-handed coverage is possible, when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another. People just want to read stuff that reinforces their preconceived notions, and I am no exception.

      Find me a story with no slant, and i'll show you a story (virtually) no one read.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    4. Re:I don't get it by Unordained · · Score: 2

      Crowd-sourcing content is one aspect, but I'm very much looking forward to "subscribing" to a story and getting only updates after that -- as short as possible, whether they be corrections, links to related stories, or truly new information. I can fit a lot more news into my day if I don't have to hear/read the same context/intro information each time there's an update.

      Less important to me is a "ask the author" system, by which readers can suggest directions for investigative journalists to take: how is this incident related to previous ones, what's the political context for this, does anyone have any proposed solutions to the problem, has anything changed since this story was posted 6 months ago, etc. I don't necessarily want to read opinions from fellow readers, nor post my own "facts" as a citizen-journalist, I just want to prod journalists into doing more of what they already do well.

    5. Re:I don't get it by Larry+Sanger · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hi, I'm the Infobitt founder/CEO. No, it's not the same thing at all. Wikinews doesn't address itself to the problem of making sense of the news in the face of facts being scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, etc. Traditional citizen journalism just gives people a platform to write articles and pretend to be journalists. We're not doing that. We're inviting people to find, rank, summarize both individual facts and stories (which we call bitts, which are made up of facts). Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.

    6. Re:I don't get it by radtea · · Score: 2

      I don't think even-handed coverage is possible, when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another.

      We can at least hope for news stories that convey a minimal amount of relevant background information: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

      The cost of supplying a few concrete facts relevant to the background of each story is apparently too much for various news outlets, but with the kind of crowd-sourcing Larry is suggesting this could be done. It'll be interesting to see how this effort evolves.

      Ideology may always be with us, in the sense that that "there is no view from no where" but it is (precisely!) equally true that "there is no view of no where", and modern news organizations apparently forget that. They routinely distort the news to the point where it is almost unrecognizable (ask anyone who has been close to any matter reported in the news). Part of the value of sites like /. is that sometimes we get people here who can untangle the journalist's mix of ideology and ignorance from the subject of the story, which gives us all a better view of reality, which of course is possible (your smartphone wouldn't work if it wasn't.)

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    7. Re:I don't get it by ah.clem · · Score: 2

      You know, I like this idea a lot, but I am not sure about it's success. I can see it would be very useful for collecting like information into one place and provide a single point of entry for all information relating to a particular story or like stories (for example, a few days after the Ferguson shooting, a white cop in a southern town shot an unarmed black man he pulled over for a seat belt violation, and the city sat on the information and video for almost a week, which resulted in no story at all, which I believe was the point - who knows about that shooting? What else happened in the world that day that got by *me* in all the noise?). Your Infobitt system would have allowed for that information to be posted almost immediately; no axes grinding, just the facts - unarmed black driver shot by white policeman, city refusing to release any information. Folks who cared would want to know that. I suspect that that people don't want to know about things anymore. I read many news feeds every day and I also read the comments for most articles. It's pretty much a troll and hate fest. In my opinion, the media is used to divide, not unite or inform. The trolls and haters don't want to see facts, they just seem to want to turn the crank a little tighter. Folks like me might be inclined to contribute to Infobitt, but really, who will be reading it? Again, just my opinion, but I think that most folks would have no idea how to use the data collected and summarized, feel even more frustrated and powerless, and spend more time in front of the television. A front-end without a back is not very effective, IMO. Perhaps I am missing the back-end? The tools that allow people to act/react in a significant way to what they are reading? That would be essential to the success of this venture, IMO.

      --
      "Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
    8. Re:I don't get it by schnell · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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 .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
    9. Re:I don't get it by nbauman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Drudge Report and Slashdot by mi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Online news has become ridiculously confusing.

    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.
    1. Re:Drudge Report and Slashdot by mi · · Score: 2

      You're joking, right?

      Not at all. But you are welcome to cite examples of important things happening, that weren't mentioned on either the two sites.

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    2. Re: Drudge Report and Slashdot by sycodon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Drudge rarely, if ever, provides original content. He is simply an aggregator that provides links to news he thinks is relevant or interesting...often to"liberal" sites.

      So get off your ignorant high horse.

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
  3. Online news by fhic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Online news by mythosaz · · Score: 2

      I too use Google News to see what's going on, but for every story large enough, I find myself reading the Wikipedia page.

      Too much "mainstream news" (and I loathe myself for saying that) is opinions about the opinions of other people with opinions on the news. Tune in at 11 for Kim Kardasian's reaction to the NFL "Hand's Up" player entrance reaction to protester's reactions about Ferguson verdicts -- our experts will provide insight!

      At least the Wikipedia page gives me information on all the players -- can't tell 'em apart without a scorecard -- and I can make my own decisions.

      If Wikipedia tried to be news, it'd be like reading the Talk page on Scientology :)

    2. Re:Online news by vux984 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ugh. I dislike google but credit where credit is due.

      I didn't see any:

      10 things articles
      6 ways articles
      Guess what X is Y
      No Celebrity gossip
      No pun headlines
      No shock headlines "X will shock you..." / "You'll be amazed by Y" etc

      wow. I didn't know new like that still existed outside of places like /. nevermind that google would be behind one.

      Thanks

    3. Re:Online news by Larry+Sanger · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Infobitt founder/CEO here. Hey, I love Google News. But what they don't do is summarize the stories, nor do they make a credible effort of organizing the news in a way that makes it possible to get caught up with the news quickly and efficiently. Suppose you want to really learn about a story that is being covered by many different news sources. Google News provides the awesome service of letting you find all the coverage quickly. But what they don't do is make it any easier to extract original reporting from among the facts contained in those articles. You can read one article, and that will get your fingers on one part of the elephant...but if you want to handle the whole elephant, you'll have to wade through all the other articles as well. A community of newshounds could do that for you, summarizing all the unique facts in a nonredundant way, putting them in order of importance. That's what we're trying to do.

    4. Re:Online news by Cpt_Kirks · · Score: 2

      Your news site is DOA.

      I can't even LOOK at it without "signing up"?

      I can at least LOOK at EVERY OTHER NEWS SITE without giving them my info.

      Loose the sign in requirement, or go away.

  4. US Centric? by irrational_design · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:US Centric? by GLMDesigns · · Score: 2

      Interesting. Give some examples.

      --
      If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
      Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
    2. Re:US Centric? by _Sharp'r_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ever read mainstream news reporting about a topic you were very familiar with? Perhaps something related to technology, or a local issue you were in the middle of?

      Most people have had that experience. The more you know about something, the less the story seems to be accurate.

      Yeah, all the rest of the news stories are about that accurate also, people just mostly don't notice.

      Think about it.... it's mostly some j-school grad who asked a couple people some questions to get quotes, then threw the "story" together. Usually they're lucky if they understood what they were told, let alone can explain it in a manner which actually enlightens their audience.

      My best luck as been with subject matter experts who blog on news topics related to their subject. So I get my economics news and analysis from economics professors (not the pet ones in the NY Times), my legal news from law professors and judges who blog, my technical news from a technical site focused on that part of the industry, etc...

      Even then you have to be willing to read multiple viewpoints to try and see a bigger picture than one voice is going to paint for you.

      --
      The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
    3. Re:US Centric? by swillden · · Score: 2

      My experience is that, regardless of country, the reporting of any news of which I have firsthand knowledge is wrong in all sorts of ways. Usually they get the gist right, but that's about it... and they don't always get that much right. I remind myself regularly that this cannot be an artifact related to my personal knowledge, but that all news reporting must be flawed.

      Just take everything with a grain of salt. Or a pound.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    4. Re:US Centric? by Larry+Sanger · · Score: 2

      Infobitt founder/CEO here. We want to solve this problem by creating a separate homepage for each nationality, or perhaps simply by filtering the news in a certain clever way that I won't bother to describe. The great thing about a big online community coming together to build Infobitt will be that we can indeed compare different sources. Perhaps your impressions of U.S. news is correct. Perhaps when stacked up directly with other reporting, you'll find it's not as bad as you think. We'll be able to tell much more easily because facts from different sources will be rubbing shoulders within the same bitts (stories = collections of facts).

    5. Re:US Centric? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

      We want to solve this problem by creating a separate homepage for each nationality

      ... like google news already does ...

      r perhaps simply by filtering the news in a certain clever way that I won't bother to describe

      ... probably because it doesn't exist yet ...

      the great thing about a big online community coming together to build Infobitt will be that we can indeed compare different sources. Perhaps your impressions of U.S. news is correct. Perhaps when stacked up directly with other reporting, you'll find it's not as bad as you think.

      ... like google news already does ...

      These sorts of stories irritate a lot of us because we've (1) seen them too often before, and (2) if you were to pitch this on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den they'd ask you what your differentiators are, your revenue model, and why they shouldn't throw you out in the first 30 seconds.

      The rules are the same as in the tank - "Don't tell us - show us." If you don't have something already up and running, you have nothing. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Unproven ideas are worth even less.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    6. Re:US Centric? by blahplusplus · · Score: 2

      "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."

      The elites are afraid of political awakening, and you really don't understand what science has discovered about the brian... you dear sir, don't live in 'reality'. See the science:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Also a real news site:

      http://therealnews.com/t2/

      The (mass surveillance) by the NSA is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Look at the following graphs:

      http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
      http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
      http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

      And then...

      WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

      http://www.businessinsider.com...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Free markets?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

      http://www.amazon.com/Democrac...

      "We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

      In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

  5. Re:Comparison to Wikinews by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since they "are still in early stages", how would you want them to differentiate themselves? I can think of a few things that can set it apart from a site like Wikinews which is based on vanilla Mediawiki:
    - Multiple, personal, compound filters (subject, region, country, town, breaking, highest ranked)
    - Rich feeds (mail, RSS)
    - A personalized front page based on your filters with some "suggested reading" thrown in
    - Article ranking based on moderation and reputation (of both source site and submitter)
    - Comment section (we need our flamewars)
    - A mobile app (yes, you can go with a mobile theme, but some newspapers and news aggregators have apps that actually make finding and reading stuff a lot easier)

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  6. Fark by Snotnose · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. This would only work if by ihtoit · · Score: 2

    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
  8. A Citizendium for news? by dpbsmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:A Citizendium for news? by Aluvus · · Score: 2

      Your post confuses me. For quite some time after Wikipedia got big, Wales tried to downplay the role that Sanger had in Wikipedia, specifically choosing not to refer to him as a "cofounder". That was historical revisionism.

      And I don't find anything horrifically disingenuous about Sanger describing himself as the Wikipedia guy rather than the Citizendium guy. I am confident that Elon Musk does not introduce himself as having worked on a late-90s project to transfer money wirelessly between Palm Pilot devices (which was the original business plan for Paypal, the company that made him rich).

      On the other hand, this is obvious spam that does not even acknowledge the existence of Wikinews, which is as much a "Wikipedia for news" as it is possible for something to be.

      --
      Never mistake "can" for "should".
  9. Wikipedia is too biased for my news. by BrookHarty · · Score: 3

    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.

    1. Re:Wikipedia is too biased for my news. by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wikipedia has another reason for that. The internet is not random sample. It does lean quite liberal, by American standards. Partly because internet culture started off in academic and student populations, and partly because a lot of the english-speaking members are from the UK, Australia, Canada, and other places Americans tend to regard as borderline communist states.

  10. This guy spammed Hacker News last week by Animats · · Score: 2

    Same story was on Hacker News last week. From the same guy.

    1. Re:This guy spammed Hacker News last week by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      ... and now some MOAH FACEBOOK:

      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.
  11. Solving the wrong problem by quantaman · · Score: 2

    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
  12. In a similar vein... newslines.org by lindseyp · · Score: 2

    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