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