Mediaboss Marketing

While sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have been plagued with bogus political storiescreated by Moldovan teenagers and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, Wikipedia, the webs de facto encyclopedia, has remained notably fake news free. As co-founder Jimmy Wales put it in recently in an interview with VICE News, the phenomenon of fake news has had almost no impact on Wikipedia.

Wales would be first to tell you why: Wikipedias thousands of volunteer editors and the sites high sourcing standards, he says, are remarkably effective at keeping even contested entries clean.

Now Wales, 50, wants to apply whats worked at Wikipedia to the actual business of news. Its called Wikitribune, which like Wikipedia will depend on its community of readers for funding and real-time fact checking, alongside a paid staff of journalists who report, write and fact check stories. The projects tagline: Evidence-based journalism.

To raise money forthe launch, Wales is running a 29-day fundraising campaign that bears more than a passing resemblance to Wales infamous annual pleas for Wikipedias funding drives. The site will be supported by monthly contributors, rather than ad revenue.

The number of people who have been willing to pay for subscriptions has really skyrocketed, Wales said in a CNN interview on Tuesday, which leads him to believe the public is really ready to say we want quality journalism.

Wales has been thinking about this idea for some time now. In an interview in January, he flicked at a couple of ideas that are now a part of the Wikitribune project. Rather than focus on partnerships with sites like what Facebook is doing with Politifact, which Wales characterized as a top-down approach, Wikitribune will allow its readers to verify journalists sources in real-time.

Wales gives Facebook a lot of credit for attacking the problem of fake news. It is great that Facebook is turning to outside third parties like Politifact and Snopes.com, Wales said in an email, although hes skeptical of whether Facebooks approach will ultimately work.

I dont think anybody who is trying to think about being a good citizen online is comfortable with saying, well, Facebook should decide what [news] were looking at, he said.

Traditional journalism has also been top-down, but Wales said that wont be the approach at Wikitribune. And I do not agree that hiring journalists to work side by side as equals with community members is top down, he said. That is old-school thinking that journalists are by default above the community.

He also said that advertising was a factor in propagating fake news on social media, and that readers can reasonably wonder if the New York Times [and other news publications] is being influenced inappropriately by advertisers.

On Wikipedia, reliable sources are the standard to which citations are held, meaning that editors can and frequently do yank things that arent properly sourced. With some exceptions, academic studies have consistently maintained that Wikipedia, on the whole, is accurate and competitive with non-community sourced rivals like Encyclopedia Britannica.

However, the system is imperfect. A 2011 survey found that only 9 percent of Wikipedia editors identified as female, and a 2012 paper in American Behavioral Scientist, a peer-reviewed academic journal, found that the number of active Wikipedia editors dropped from around 50,000 in 2006 to about 35,000 in 2011, resulting in a substantial decrease in the quality of Wikipedia articles.

Still, Wikitribune is not Wikipedia, and it will not a be news site written by Wikipedia editors. Presumably, Wikitribune articles will be shared on Facebook and other social networks. And Facebook, where 44 percent of Americans get news (at least occasionally), is where a huge part of the problem lies. Facebook is meant to be a platform where people share photos and things with their friends, he said.

Though Wikitribunes citizen-professional collaboration model is untested, it will just be one publication among many whose articles get passed around on Facebook, and Wales knows this. He said over email that because Wikitribune relies in part on the broader community, it will be able to do more to point out fake stories.

Community participation means scale, Wales said. How much time does the New York Times spend debunking fake news? Not a lot.

See the original post here:
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks you'll pay for crowdsourced journalism that's free of fake news - VICE News

You are solely responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our Terms of Service.

We moderate comments. Our goal is to provide substantive commentary for a general readership. By screening submissions, we provide a space where readers can share intelligent and informed commentary that enhances the quality of our news and information.

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. Because of the volume of reader comments, we cannot review individual moderation decisions with readers.

We value thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point quickly and politely. We make an effort to protect discussions from repeated comments either by the same reader or different readers

We follow the same standards for taste as the daily newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. Don't include URLs to Web sites.

We do not edit comments. They are either approved or deleted. We reserve the right to edit a comment that is quoted or excerpted in an article. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation.

We welcome strong opinions and criticism of our work, but we don't want comments to become bogged down with discussions of our policies and we will moderate accordingly.

We appreciate it when readers and people quoted in articles or blog posts point out errors of fact or emphasis and will investigate all assertions. But these suggestions should be sent via e-mail. To avoid distracting other readers, we won't publish comments that suggest a correction. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.

Excerpt from:
Wikipedia founder tackles fake news with Wikitribune - Tribune-Review

Wikipedia used to be free on mobile in Nepal. When a service doesnt get counted against a mobile subscribers data plan, thats called a zero rating. In places where the dominant online encyclopedia is free, its calledWikipedia Zero. Private cellular provider Ncell cancelled the service at the end of March, according to Indian news siteThe Wire. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia remains free in parts of the developing world as different as Tajikistan and Angola,according to the Wikimedia Foundations website. In fact, that page shows that Afghanistan is the latest place where the program went live, doing so just last week for people subscribed to theRoshan mobile carrier.

As weve previously reported, Wikipedia isnt just a place to get information. It also gives people a chance to contribute to one of the most robust repositories of knowledge on Earth, making it a transformational resource for the worlds poorest people. That said, while Wikipedia is good, the whole internet is better. Some open web advocates worry that free mobile access to one of the most widely used services online inhibits demands for infrastructure sufficient to provide access to the entire web.

The cost of mobile data can be a barrier to accessing the free, volunteer-contributed information on Wikipedia. In Iraq, for example, a recent survey revealed that the high cost of data limited internet use for a majority of participants, Juliet Barbara, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote the Observer in an email. Wikipedia Zero exists to address the affordability barrier in countries where our readers and editors cant afford the mobile data charges to access Wikipedia.

The foundation administers Wikipedia, but it doesnt provide editorial control. Its zero rating program operates under a series of principles, one of which is this: no one gets paid. Wikimedia doesnt pay the provider and the provider doesnt pay Wikimedia. It also makes partners commit to not editing or changing pages on the site.

Yes. On a global scale, the digital divide is bad.

Last year, the World Economic Forum reported that four billion people lack internet access; however, the mobile internet is minting far more new internet users these days than desktops connected to broadband, as the Pew Research Center has reported.

One commonality between the developing world and ours: data costs money on mobile. The more subscribers use, the more it costs, but if Wikipedia doesnt count against a data plan, then people wont hesitate to go to the encyclopedia and learn about the world (or to contribute to it, so that the rest of the world can learn about ignored places).

Its debatable.

If one site is free to visit and another isnt, users will more likely become habituated to using the free site. Twitter and Facebook startedpaying for free access to users around the world about three years ago. Then Google followed suit. Obviously this costs the companies money in the short term, but it locks in audience over time.

Although it may seem like a humane strategy to offer users from developing countries crumbs from the Internets table in the form of free access to walled-garden services, such service may thrive at the cost of stifling the development of low-cost, neutral Internet access in those countries for decades to come, Jeremy Malcolm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in 2014. EFF doesnt always oppose zero ratings. It has a detailed breakdown of the complex issues raised by zero rating certain resources.

In 2014, tech companies and advocates in the U.S. hada big fight over internet speed. Big companies wanted to pay for priority access to internet users. For example, Google might have paid some internet providers so that its music service loaded faster for itssubscribers, so people on that network might decide to switch to Google Music from Spotify. The fight was referred to as net neutrality. As usual, John Olivers explainer was best.

Making the data for a service free on mobile has a very similar effect to making it faster on the web. Both create an unfairly superior user experience. When Wikimedia Foundation embraces a free data model for its most famous product, that makes itharder to explain whats pernicious about free access to tech giants websites. The new head of the FCC, Ajit Pai, has made it clear that he sees free data programs as a net benefit to consumers.

Yes. In a 2014 blog post, Deputy Director Erik Mueller wrote, The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open internet.

Its hard for any organization that supports a walled-garden approach to internet access to also defend everyones right to chose where they go and what they do online, Timothy Karr of the advocacy group Free Press wrote the Observer in an email. Wikimedia, he argued,could use its considerable influence to defend open internet protections while supporting universal access to all of the world wide web, and not just to a part of it.

Also in 2014, another Wikimedia staff member, Gayle Karen Young, admitted to theWashington Post that we have a complicated relationship toit.We believe in net neutrality in America. She went on to predict that as data charges dropped around the world, Wikipedia Zero wouldnt be necessary any longer. Honestly, we dont think well have to do it for very long, she said.

The longest running Wikipedia Zero programs still running are in Montenegro and Thailand, which both launched Wikipedia Zero in 2012. In total, the Wikimedia Foundation shows 49 countries with active zero rating programs for the encyclopedia.

See original here:
Wikipedia Is Not Free in Nepal Because of a Cellphone Company - Observer

caption Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales. source Carl Court/Getty Images

LONDON - It was Kellyanne Conway who convinced Jimmy Wales to create a media company.

On Tuesday, the Wikipedia cofounder announced Wikitribune, a new community-powered news outlet that aims to combat fake news and mistrust of the media - and he says it was remarks by the controversial Trump advisor who inadvertently pushed him to do so.

"I've been thinking about this for quite a long time, I've been working on ideas and so forth, it was always a backburner project," he told Business Insider in a telephone interview on Monday.

"But there was a moment: A friend had persuaded me that we should all give Donald Trump 100 days, we should just assume the best and hope he would do well, and be supportive of the presidency in general.

"And then on day one, Kellyanne Conway came out and said 'alternative facts,' and I was like 'that's it, game over, I'm done, I can't put up with this.' So that's when I really started pushing forward, to say this really needs to happen - I need, for my personal feeling of values in the world, I need to be involved in trying to help with this problem."

Wikitribune will work as a kind of hybrid between a traditional news organisation and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Professional journalists will work alongside community volunteers to write and edit stories, "working side-by-side as equals," Wales said.

The 50-year-old internet entrepreneur will, at least at first, serve as CEO and in an editor-in-chief-esque role managing the site's output.

Generating revenue is a notoriously tricky problem for media organisations, who see organisations like Google and Facebook gobble up advertising revenue while news consumers grow accustomed to free access to news. Wikitribune won't attempt to buck this trend by charging a compulsory membership fee - instead it will ask readers if they're willing to pay a voluntary subscription or make a donation to fund its operations, in a similar vein to Wikipedia.

Wales said Wikitribune will focus on news stories with impact over viral pieces: "You can't beat them at your own game, you've got to do something different and interesting." This kind of citizen-augmented journalism will prove valuable in stories like data breaches, he said, when large numbers of eyeballs are needed to "go through really tedious stuff" to find the newsworthy information hidden inside.

There has been debate in liberal circles about "fake news" for months amid historically low levels of trust in the mainstream media. Some have even suggested that fake news stories circulating on platforms like Facebook helped Donald Trump win his shock victory in the US presidential election.

But "citizen journalism" and community-driven investigations can have problems with reliability too - perhaps most notoriously when would-be sleuths on Reddit accused the wrong man of being behind the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

"Reddit has some amazing fantastic communities, it has some horrible places, it's a big noisy place, but it isn't really designed for - and it doesn't really aim at - doing fact-checked journalism and publishing stories," Wales said.

"In that particular case I actually felt like Reddit as a whole got treated a bit unfairly, like, a handful of people on a messageboard started claiming that 'hey, we think this guy did it.' Well, that's the internet for you, it's broad, wide open."

He added: "For us, it's a matter of: If you were going to publish a story you would really want to have that fact-checked, approved, and so forth ... the difference is you've got to set firm social norms and rules up front about what it is we're trying to accomplish."

Read this article:
Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is launching a community-powered news site - Business Insider Nordic

The Muji Hut is a minimalist's dream, at least until it's filled to the brim with all those adorable Muji products. The Japanese retailer has just unveiled the diminutive house, which clocks in at less than 100 square feet (or roughly the same size asone of their body fit cushions).The Muji Hut is priced at 3,000,000 (USD $27,000) and, sadly, will only be for sale in Japan.

The very tiny house features sliding glass windows, plywood interiors, a corrugated roof, and a "Shou Sugi Ban" wood exterior, sourced from Japan. It does not have plumbing, heating, or exhaust, though, so plan accordingly (as in, put it next to a real house that has all of those things). AsCore 77 points out, the Muji Hut does not include plans for electricity, despite the fact that a (Muji) lamp is featured in the photos. Ponder that mystery as you sit in your minimalist and chic tiny hut in the backyard.

[Photo: Muji] ML

Read the original here:
Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is launching Wikitribune to fight fake news - Fast Company