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.
The new project will use a wiki-style setup and experiment with bringing together professional journalists and community contributors to produce fact-checked, global news stories. At launch, we'll be using a hacked version of wordpress and we'll be evaluating whether that's the right tool moving forward. Wordpress has a lot to commend it (free software, mature platform, used by lots of newsrooms, active developer ecosystem) but also has some philosophy that's quite "top down" in a way. (Not many people would think in a wiki way when setting up a newsroom!)
This new initiative, Wikitribune, will be a learning experience - my vision is one that I've had a hard time explaining... except to Wikimedians who tend to immediately get it.
While I am launching this project independent from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, it is my plan that this new project will work alongside Wikimedia in the free knowledge movement. For example, I hope that the numerous Wikinews/Wikinoticias/Wikinotizie/etc. communities can collaborate with the Wikitribune community in way that allows both to learn and benefit from each other. Additionally, Wikitribune will utilize the same Creative Commons license (CC-BY) as other free content projects in the news space - so they can take the stories written by our professional journalists and communities and make use of them.
You can find out more information about Wikitribune at: https://www.wikitribune.com
Thank you for your time and I'm happy to answer questions! (But I'm quite swamped with everything at the moment so please forgive me if I answer in bursts!)
--Jimbo