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.

Comments

I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this already a thing?

Re:I don't get it

[richlv]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[HBI]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[Larry Sanger]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[schnell]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[nbauman]

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.

Online news

[fhic]

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.

Re:Online news

[vux984]

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

Re:Online news

[Larry Sanger]

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.

US Centric?

[irrational_design]

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.

Re:US Centric?

[_Sharp'r_]

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.

Re:Comparison to Wikinews

[JaredOfEuropa]

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)

Wikipedia is too biased for my news.

[BrookHarty]

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.

Re:Wikipedia is too biased for my news.

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:This guy spammed Hacker News last week

[BarbaraHudson]

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?