[Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project

[Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales]

Delirium wrote:
> I certainly hope it can be done in a reasonable way, but I'm wondering 
> if there's been any thought as to how to differentiate this from 
> Indymedia?  From what I can tell, Indymedia does use bylined reporters 
> for many of its articles, but they still end up generally being, well, 
> not very neutral.  Hopefully Wikinews would end up rather more credible 
> than Indymedia, but how to ensure that?

I think these are reasonable questions, and I also think that there
are reasonable answers to them.

The core answer is: wiki.  By removing an ethos of "individual
ownership" over particular articles, and replacing it with an ethos of
"consensus", the sharpest edges of bias get worn down very quickly.

> But somehow it seems like it'll naturally attract more of the other sort 
> of people---activists who are reporting with a particular agenda in 
> mind.  That tends to lead to the facts being arranged to fit the 
> pre-held agenda, rather than the other way around...

This is entirely possible, but of course, the same can be said of
wikipedia, and it is in fact a problem for us (though not terribly
much so, most of the time).  We have cases where activists camp out on
articles and make it quite difficult for alternative perspectives to
balance the presentation -- but even so, we still manage to be better
in these cases than virtually all other sources.

We live in an era when citizens have to decide which part of the media
is more dishonest: organizations like Fox News, which have dropped all
pretense of neutrality, or organizations like the New York Times or
CBS News, which have dropped the neutrality but kept the pretense.

It would be hard to be much worse than what routinely passes for
journalism these days.  And I think if we try, we can be a lot better.

--Jimbo