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Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales is Launching an Online Publication To Fight Fake News (cnn.com)
Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. The news site is called Wikitribune. From a report: "We want to make sure that you read fact-based articles that have a real impact in both local and global events," the publication's website states. The site will publish news stories written by professional journalists. But in a page borrowed from Wikipedia, internet users will be able to propose factual corrections and additions. The changes will be reviewed by volunteer fact checkers. Wikitribune says it will be transparent about its sources. It will post the full transcripts of interviews, as well as video and audio, "to the maximum extent possible." The language used will be "factual and neutral."
If there's anything I've learned about journalism in the last 41 years, it's that everyone puts their own slant on it. Regardless of their politics.
...the launch of Wikitribune has been dismissed as a fake news by Jimmy Wales itself.
Rather than write yet more material, why not make a way to consolidate links to various topics in a convenient way so that one can read multiple viewpoints? That way I can see what Fox News says about any given topic, but also what NBC says about the same topic. Use the fancy dancy AI, probably with human helpers, to match up articles about given events.
Table-ized A.I.
Are you part of the Illiminati?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Un huh... They'll have their own little *Ministry of Truth* there?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales is Launching an Online Publication To Fight Anything That Isn't Left-Wing Propaganda
FTFY
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Professional journalists producing fact-checked, multi-sourced articles with a neutral tone and striving for accuracy ... I thought this was just called journalism? Why do they need amateur community contributors that are guaranteed to be infiltrated and rotten to the core with activists and paid shills?
Professional journalists are some of the highest-profile PRODUCERS of fake news. I accidentally tuned to CNN the other night. Holy mackerel. I had no idea that Chicago's rampant crime problem only got really bad when the new administration put the new nation-wide Muslim ban in place. Hopefully Jimmy Wales won't be looking to get Wolf Blitzer involved in fighting fake news, because that's like getting gasoline involved in fighting a fire.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
... it won't happen until FAKE NEWS is illimanated.
The layers of fake news are wrongly arranged, because they are ill laminated.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Oh good. I want Jimmy Wales to be in charge of what I'm told is true and what is false. It is not like people would ever lie about stuff like that for political agendas. I'll trust Jimmy's politics over my own common sense.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Citation needed
A leading "fact-check site" regularly uses this bit of dissemblance to describe right-of-center incidents, while left-of-center equivalents seem to get "True" or at least "Mostly true." As with all things, there are exceptions.
They'll do a good job explaining--reluctantly, if we infer from their words--how whatever was said or referenced was, in fact, accurate. Then launch 3 more paragraphs explaining why the facts don't matter because of who said them.
And this was common pre-Trump.
Because this sounds like Snopes but for actual journalism.
If there is still anyone thinking that Wikipedia is in any way neutral, they need do little more than learn a language or two and compare a couple of articles locked for editing. Look at the one for GamerGate. Off the bat, it's described as a hate movement and no credence is given to the participants' claims that they oppose corruption in video game journalism. Now look at several foreign articles, such as the German one, which immediately describes the movement as an anti-corruption movement. You may be on either site of the fence, but either way at least one of the articles has to be very biased given the circumstances. That these people want to check news for facts is the joke of a century.
Not making any excuses for CNN as that's inexcusable.
But I highly recommend having all tabs muted by default.
I use the mutetab extension with the Tab audio muting UI control enabled in chrome.
The AutoMute extension also works well.
Having to unmute tabs is a minor annoyance for me compared to having things start playing in the background i'm not expecting.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
What do you do when there are people who don't want to read about the truth but rather articles with heavy editorial that they agree with regardless of any bearing on reality? I think that's the real problem we are running into.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is an example of how far the Left has strayed from its classical liberal roots.
The very idea that any organization could set itself up to be the arbiter of the Truth in media is anathema to everything a classical liberal believe in.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And as always, the first comment on Slashdot is a smug, cynical dismissal of the subject at hand.
There are a lot of problems with "fact-based news", the biggest one being identification of actual "facts."
Look at ProPublica as an example. Their MO is generally to take facts and build a giant lie without ever actually lying, technically. I've given them thorough dressings-down for their blatant attacks on the American Red Cross and Amazon, but nobody actually cares because ProPublica has a better hook: take something people trust and convince them that trust has been violated. There are a few good examples here, though.
The familiar American Red Cross attack article on their handling of Haiti claimed ARC lies about the amount of overhead because they hire independent contractors. The reasoning is that ARC keeps 9% of their revenue stream as operating expenses, but their real overhead is around 40% or higher because they hire contractors who also have operating expense--never mind that the contractors are more-efficient than any non-professional, non-expert option, or that the materials have "overhead" because they need to be mined, shipped, and sold. Things aren't magicked into existence, and ARC isn't a vertically-integrated organization with expertise in everything; they generally try to bring the most-efficient solution to a problem, and that means hiring the best contractors they can find, that being the ones who perform at the highest return per cost invested.
ProPublica has repeatedly published ARC internal documents and loudly shouted that ARC is hiding and ignoring serious defects in their organization's handling of major disasters. This one's even simpler: the documents they published were Lesson's Learned documentation. They discussed what problems they had, why they had problems, and any potential methods for avoiding those problems in future disaster scenarios. Many are marked for further review and discussion. The documents ProPublica published are explicitly for the purpose of identifying problems encountered and preventing them in the future, yet they managed to claim ARC is "hiding and ignoring" all of these problems.
Their article on Amazon's "Buy Box" claims they always put Amazon first, even if they're more-expensive. What actually happens is Amazon (almost) always displays the lowest price-plus-shipping option for a particular product by default; and Amazon uses the lowest-price shipping option for that, which is Amazon's Subscribe and Save shipping. You can get free shipping by having $25 of items in your box or having Prime; ProPublica unilaterally applied a non-free shipping option to inflate the total cost. They also nitpicked about Amazon always listing Shipped by Amazon options first in the full list of sellers, even when these aren't the lowest price options; if Amazon didn't do that, they could have instead attacked them for advertising "free shipping" but making it "difficult to find the Amazon-shipped items to actually get it".
Notice the facts. Facts, facts, facts. ARC spent $500 billion, built 6 houses, was going to build 50 but gave up (never mind that the project was determined wasteful and pointless, and people were dying of a cholera epidemic that ARC stopped instead). Amazon shows you their option first and doesn't count shipping in their prices (never mind that free shipping is an option but alternate sellers don't offer it). ProPublica gives facts and tells you what to think about them.
It gets worse.
Jimbo Wales thinks he can fix this sort of un-news. Does he think he can identify and gate out finicky reasoning and spin? Can he identify when facts are missing, or induce others to do so? For that matter, can we identify who has the most-correct and most-complete set of facts, and if they're disclosing them all without ordering them to create an alternate narrative?
It takes some inherent bias to break fake news. I tear down fake articles I understand, and I hit economics pretty hard because I like economics. Fake news isn'
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