WikiTribune: an antidote to fake news that could become bigger than major newspapers

In a shared work space more than 20 floors up in The Shard tower in London, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is plotting what he hopes will be a revolution in news media by handing control over to the reading public.

WikiTribune, the platform which Wales anticipates will be an antidote to biased reporting and fake news, launches on Monday after being in Beta testing mode for the past eight weeks. The news service is based on Wales’s unwavering trust in a collaborative approach to compiling authentic information, a model that has made Wikipedia the fifth-most visited website in the world.

Although WikiTribune’s small newsroom will include a core of highly-experienced journalists, it will depend on an army of volunteer contributors (500-strong and growing) to fact-check and correct articles where necessary.

If the WikiTribune project is successful it has potential to become a genuine “publication of record”, the claim which titles such as the New York Times and The Times have historically made.

Vital in this era of ‘fake news’

WikiTribune’s promised commitment to transparent sourcing of its reporting could also mean it will play a key role in fact-checking stories, a vital function in the current climate of fake news. That would amount to a remarkable achievement for Wales, given how professional journalists liked to mock the early Wikipedia for its unreliability and susceptibility to manipulation.

Achieving such noble aims will be a big ask for an organisation so dependent on volunteers. Wikipedia has taken 16 years to get where it is, and WikiTribune is not going to transform the news industry overnight. While Wales, a London-based American, has been been hands-on with the project, he is not bankrolling WikiTribune, which is relying on crowd-funding for support (4,500 people have so far signed up to contribute).

“We are trying something new and that means taking risks and challenging established ways of doing things,” Wales tells me. “The current ways of funding and presenting news don’t appear to be working that well so I hope people will embrace the opportunity to try a new approach. People took to Wikipedia because they learned they could trust it. This project could put the trust back into news.”

Top reporters and editors

WikiTribune’s launch editor is news veteran Peter Bale, president of the Global Editors network and a former executive with CNN and Microsoft. Bale promises two significant investigative stories to announce the platform’s arrival and give encouragement to its financial supporters.

He admits that “the judgment about what we do and don’t cover is incredibly important” and cites the Catalan independence issue as a “really good” subject for WikiTribune, as “an international story of some import, [with] multiple points of view”. Polling of WikiTribune supporters has revealed particular interest in politics; international affairs, economics and science.

The WikiTribune team was encouraged by Wikipedia’s comprehensive 28,000-word account of the Grenfell Tower disaster. “It was updated incredibly quickly with great veracity and excellent sourcing back to the original material, almost like a real time blog. That was inspiring to Wikipedians.” Bale has recruited a small team of top-flight reporters including London-based Burhan Wazir, formerly with The Times and Al-Jazeera.

Jodie DeJonge, former editor of the Cambodia Daily, will report for WikiTribune from Bangkok. Bale has hired New Orleans-based investigative reporter Steve Beatty and experienced New Zealand journalist Charles Anderson.

Sharing articles to fact check

WikiTribune will showcase its articles in a daily emailed newsletter called The Briefing.

Journalists will be encouraged to share drafts of their articles with WikiTribune community members who can suggest changes in a “Talk” feature which is intended as a more civil version of newspaper comment sections. Bale accepts this “opening of the sausage machine” might be hard for journalists to cope with.

WikiTribune’s approach to journalism will closely follow the principles of the ground-breaking The Trust Project, based at Santa Clara University in California and dedicated to rebuilding public faith in news.

Bale says he wants to avoid the simplistic “binary” reporting of news in adversarial terms. “We are trying to get beyond the good guys and bad guys stories,” he says.

He has given each of his staff a T-shirt from the website of “Bad Science” author Ben Goldacre, carrying the slogan “I Think You’ll Find It’s a Little More Complicated Than That”, and he wants that to be a WikiTribune “guiding principle”.

If this project becomes established it could move the dial in terms of news reporting practice, even among publications with well-defined political agendas.

“The best we can hope for is that it sends a positive signal to other publishers that there is value in transparency and in trusting your audience,” says Bale. “If opening up the machine to the public helps increase trust in media then that has to be a good thing.”