Jimmy Wales, the creator of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has launched a site targeted at countering the pass on of fake media by combining professional journalists and a community of volunteers and followers to produce media articles. The brand new system, called Wikitribune, will be absolve to access and take no advertising, instead counting on its readers to invest in it, as the accuracy of media records will be easily verifiable as source materials will be publicized, Wales said.
“The news headlines is busted, but we’ve determined how to repair it,” he said in a promo video placed on the website’s homepage. The web proliferation of artificial news, a few of it made for profit plus some for politics ends, became a significant issue of angst and question in many developed countries during previous year’s U.S. presidential election. Wales argued in his video recording that because people likely to get news free of charge on the web, media sites were reliant on advertising money, which created strong bonuses to create so-called “clickbait”, catchy headlines to get viewers.
“This is problems because advertising are cheap, competition for clicks is brutal and low-quality reports sources are everywhere you go,” said Wales. He also argued that communal media sites, where an ever-increasing amount of men and women get their media, were made to show users what they wished to see, validate their biases and keep them pressing no matter what. Social media large Facebook was generally criticized this past year for not doing enough to avoid fake news reviews from distributing on its program, and has declared new tools to take on the problem.
Wales said Wikitribune would incorporate professional, standards-based journalism using what he called “the radical idea from the world of wiki a community of volunteers can and can reliably protect the integrity of information”. He said articles would be authored, fact-checked and confirmed by journalists and volunteers working jointly, while anyone can flag up issues and send fixes for review. “As the reality are updated, the news headlines becomes a full time income, growing artifact, which is exactly what the web was designed for,” he said. The Wikitribune homepage said the system would go stay in 29 days. In addition, it mentioned that the goal was to employ 10 journalists, but nothing had been appointed so far. Reuters
