Wikipedia founder tackles fake news with Wikitribune

WIKIPEDIA founder Jimmy Wales is launching a project aimed at reshaping the news media called WikiTribune – using the same principles as the popular online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching a project aimed at reshaping the news media – and tackling the scourge of misinformation – using the same collaborative principles as the revolutionary online encyclopedia.

Wikitribune will rely on a broad online community of journalists and readers as fact checkers, a crowd- sourcing model pioneered in the “wiki” system behind Wikipedia. “The news is broken and we can fix it,” reads the website of the project unveiled by Wales late last Monday, describing itself as focused on “evidence-based journalism.”

On Twitter, Wales called it “a news platform that brings journalists & volunteers together.” “Wikitribune takes professional, standards-based journalism and incorporates the radical idea from the world of Wiki that a community of volunteers can and will reliably protect and improve articles.”

The new service will be free, without advertising, relying on contributions from users in the same manner as the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia. It will ask supporters to subscribe for US$ 15 ( RM68) per month and plans to hire at least 10 journalists to manage the site. Wales told the BBC: “I think we’re in a world right now where people are very concerned about making sure we have high quality fact-based information, so I think there will be demand for this.” — AFP