Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales plans to set up a news platform to combat the problem of fake news on the internet.
Following the same principle as the online encyclopedia, news reported by WikiTribune will be fact-checked by a community of volunteers as well as by employed professional journalists.
Scheduled for launch in September 2017, it’s planned that the site will do without adverts and will finance itself thorough donations instead.
“The news is broken and we can fix it,” said Wales, criticizing the drop in journalistic standards as media companies chase advertising clicks.
The goal of WikiTribune is to make the factual basis for news stories transparent. The site aims to hire 10 to 20 journalists.
“Before the internet, we could only get our news from traditional news organizations. Editors, fact-checkers and reporters were the gatekeeps of news and we trusted them to tell the truth,” Wales said.
“Then the news went online and suddenly we wanted it all for free and we wanted advertisers to pay for it. This is a problem.”
Advisors to WikiTribune include Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, journalism lecturer Jeff Jarvis, law professor Larry Lessig and model Lily Cole, the BBC reported.
However, some scepticism was voiced about the crowd-funding model.
“There are a variety of people who if it does this right will view it as a trusted platform,” Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, told the BBC. “But another 10 to 20 people are not going to ‘fix the news.’”
Benton said he couldn’t see it scaling up to become a “massive news organisation.”
