I have a question: the news about pending Chinese "supply-side structural reforms" is almost all about matching supply to demand; for example see http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-01/22/c_136004899.htm
But if you look at pp. 42 and 63 here, you see the proposaled legislative reforms are actually about replacing a progressive income tax with a flat VAT: http://en.ndrc.gov.cn/newsrelease/201612/P020161207645765233498.pdf
Does the Wikitribune model have a way to make sure that the truth is being told? How would it work in this particular instance?
On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 6:56 AM David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25 April 2017 at 22:59, Jimmy Wales jimmywales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
Today I announced a new initiative, outside of my Wikimedia activities, to combat fake news. It is important to me that I share directly with all of you information about this new initiative early on.
I was one of the Wikipedians at the hackathon days for this, a few weeks ago. (And now it's gone live and I can speak of it in good conscience!)
The obvious comparison is Wikinews. Now, Wikinews contributors are determined that WikiNews is a good project that deserves to live, and they also resent Wikipedia for doing news more effectively as a sideline than they do as their main thing and the WMF is unfair and so forth. But from the outside view, it's important to note that approximately nobody cares about Wikinews and it's a failure in impact. Or: if WikiTribune turns out to have the content, participation and readership of Wikinews, it will have failed.
The question is why Wikinews didn't take off. There's a sort of myth that it's too process-heavy - but the rough WikiTribune rules on the day (which may or may not be the ones they go live with) were *pretty much the Wikinews process*. (I looked them up on the day.) So that isn't the missing magic ingredient.
I suspect one big problem is that journalism anyone's interested in reading involves gathering dubious information and assessing how true it is likely to be. It's pretty much a process of turning bad sources into good ones. Actual reporting tends to work like "I talked to these three separate sources, none of whose names I can print, but I'll tell you my editor." "Yep, looks likely enough to run." Bam, scoop. It's hard to do that in a fully transparent manner (put up the recordings, etc) without outing your sources. I spoke to one journalist on the day and they concurred.
And that's before you get into there being no such thing as neutral news, just news that pretends to be. It's not clear that NPOV is even a good idea - selection of stories to cover is a huge bias.
There's also the danger of the other failure mode of citizen journalism. The example I brought up on the day was BeforeItsNews.com
- I won't spoil it for you, go there and see what sort of stories it
covers and what sort of advertising it runs. It turns out you need sane editorial control at some level.
It's possible the missing magical ingredient that will let it take off will be paid professional journalists - that this will produce a news site that's exciting enough, and not just "me too" stories everyone is already running, to get subscribers. But again, it'll need some way for them to say "This is the story, I'm not revealing my sources, but me and x editor concur it's a news story we'd stand by running."
WordPress is probably the least-worst option for a CMS. MediaWiki is a horrible CMS for anything that isn't a reference work. You can do almost anything with WordPress if you throw enough money at extension development. (Which may or may not be a good idea.)
Anyway, I'll be watching closely and probably diving in at least slightly.
- d.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe