Here's Why WikiTRIBUNE Won't Be 'Fixing The News' Anytime Soon

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales just launched WikiTRIBUNE, a crowdfunded online news site dedicated to producing fact-based articles that have impact locally and globally with the goal of combating the proliferation of fake news and creating a trusted, crowd-sourced and community geared 100% ad free, non-pay walled news service.

The launch was creatively timed with The Huffington Post's re-branding and relaunched design. Purely coincidence I'm sure.

WikiTRIBUNE might work to a degree, but not anytime soon.

"The news is broken and we can fix it." - Jimmy Wales

Wales founded Wikipedia, so if there's anybody who knows about building a community and crowdfunded site it would have to be Wales. But news is tough, and especially news in today's media landscape.

Throw it against the wall and see what sticks

Trust in news is at an historic low right now and Wales just launched in WikiTRIBUNE to help solve this is a mashup of Reddit, Wikipedia, Kickstarter and evidence-based journalism.

Replace "journalists" in that graph with "moderators" and you have Reddit. The difference being that moderators on Reddit are unpaid and not trained professional journalists, but both are still human.

Despite the best training, humans will make mistakes and still inject their own opinion and bias from time to time, and that is where WikiTRIBUNE's community is supposed to come into play.

At WikiTRIBUNE, the community and journalists are equals. WikiTRIBUNE states, "Articles are authored, fact-checked, and verified by professional journalists and community members working side by side as equals, and supported not primarily by advertisers, but by readers who care about good journalism enough to become monthly supporters."

Journalists and the community are most definitely not equals. While Journalists and Reddit moderators are both human and capable of bias and making mistakes, you've still got a better shot at accuracy with a journalist. There's a reason why you never see a source in a news article pointing to Wikipedia. It isn't considered a reliable news source because it is crowdsourced information. You do see Reddit as a source because new, original content does get posted there.

There's a reason why fake news has proliferated. Community. Crowdsourcing. Your aunt on Facebook. Yes, aunt Faye is at fault here. It doesn't matter if a journalist fact checked, source checked, community checked article from WikiTRIBUNE makes its way onto aunt Faye's Facebook feed if she's a believer in Donald Trump's "FAKE NEWS!" Tweets. She could see something from WikiTRIBUNE and be totally capable of ignoring it even if the sources in the story are coming from her own family.

It might sound as if this idea is belittling the judgement and willingness of the general Internet population to think logically and use common sense. If it sounds that way, that's because it is true. If the proliferation of fake news has taught us anything, its that people believe what they want to believe. They share what they want to share regardless of all of the supporting facts, Facebook "fake news alerts" or Buzzfeed's laughable attempt with "Outside The Bubble."

So now you have another problem with this community-equal-to-journalists set up. What is a "fact" to one member of the community might not be one to another. If the community decides that an "alternate fact" from Sean Spicer is indeed a fact, does that have equal weight with the WikiTRIBUNE Journalist's assessment? If they are equal, then it should.

What happens when WikiTRIBUNE is infiltrated by community members with an agenda? Which it will be. What happens when one of the WikiTRIBUNE journalists gets doxxed? (Doxxing is when an online hoard goes after somebody and digs deep into their personal life and history) What happens if it is then found that said journalist wrote some random blog as a college student declaring his love for Marxism, socialism or some other spark?

Who vets the vetters?

Who vets and hires the Journalists? The current advisors are Guy Kawasaki, Jeff Jarvis and, wait for it, actress-model Lily Cole, who contributes to the Huffington Post blog.

As they're advisors, it is easy to assume one or the other will have a say. The most obviously qualified of the group is Jarvis. But what does Wales know of hiring credible journalists? Cole? Kawasaki? Like any startup or new company, the early employees are a reflection of the values of the founders and those involved early.

If you want to know who Jimmy Wales is and what he's about, you can read it on his own Wikipedia profile page. He's ascribed to the "Objectivist" philosophy spearheaded by the Author Ayn Rand in her novel "The Fountainhead." He offered sympathy to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. He offered to help with Britian's Labour Party's social media strategy. He's criticized Wikileaks and Julian Assange over publishing of Afghan war documents saying "they could get somebody killed." He's refused in the past to comply with Chinese censorship requests.

Read his own site to get to know him and from there you can help form a picture of the values being placed into WikiTRIBUNE.

This is all to say whoever Wales ends up choosing as those first 10 journalists is going to be extremely telling of the direction WikiTRIBUNE intends to take. (Edit: They've hired 2/10 since I wrote this yesterday)

Will they be former NYT reporters? Fox News? Huffington Post? The Guardian? The Intercept? Don't know. If Wales does intend to be completely transparent then the selection process for these journalists will also have to toe that line.

Will they crowdsource the journalists? Hope not. Will WikiTRIBUNE create a panel of what is considered neutral organizations like Nieman Journalism Lab and educational institutions to create shortlists of journalists to approach? Hope so. Who picks the panel?

There's a whole host of issues and challenges that WikiTRIBUNE is going to face in the coming months and years and its success is going to be dependent on how adept it becomes at quickly addressing these issues.

Where WikiTRIBUNE is completely on point is in the belief that there are numerous untrustworthy news sites out there playing for clicks, traffic and influence.

Where WikiTRIBUNE could really miss the mark

Wales states in his promo video that "Social media is literally designed to show us what we want to see." Truth. The filter bubble is real and that is the point of social media, at least as it stands in its current state. But Wales isn't willing to reach those people on social media who are the ones most in need of truthful news. According to The Verge, Wales says he’s confident that if the quality is good enough, WikiTRIBUNE won’t need to optimize for social media. “One thing that’s still true is that word of mouth is very powerful,” he says. “People do talk about things. Wikipedia has never paid a penny for advertising, but yet remains one of the most popular things in the world.”

Not optimizing for social media is a huge mistake. Optimizing for social media doesn't mean you have to give up journalistic integrity or editorial standards. It doesn't mean you have to break form or voice from your site. It does mean you have to adhere to more character limits for headlines and subheadlines. It does mean that you have to make more choices for featured images. It does mean you need to consider how your meta description compliments your status. It does mean your Tweets better be succinct.

You don't have to create clickbait to be successful on social media. If anything, straightforward headlines and content is making a comeback, at least on Facebook. The problem isn't optimization. That Wales fails to see this distinction indicates a stubbornness that might alienate and ignore the audiences that WikiTRIBUNE needs to reach and influence the most.

If WikiTRIBUNE becomes it's own filter bubble, then it serves no purpose and ends up having no impact.

Other publishers, marketers and advertisers need not worry

For the advertisers and marketers out there, if you're concerned this might upset your world by creating an ad-free environment in news, don't worry. Even if this model completely takes off it isn't going to impact the direction ads or native advertising is going. It also isn't going to be .00001% as damaging to you as something like the popularity of ad blockers. WikiTRIBUNE will be a barren gas giant of a planet for you to shoot a probe at and move on from in your search for revenue life while you carefully steer around (or directly into) the dual black holes, Facebook and Google, at the center of the galaxy.

Publishers need not be concerned as well, WikiTRIBUNE is not going to suddenly become the Internet's trusted source of news overnight or in the next year or so, which leaves you plenty of time to continue beefing up your own credibility. Unless of course you're The Daily Mail and never had any credibility in the first place.

WikiTRIBUNE isn't the new journalism gate keeper, at least not yet

Wales wants WikiTRIBUNE to be the new gatekeeper of truthful and evidence-based journalism. An admirable ambition by all means. I hope it succeeds. I'll donate my $10 or $20 to it because while it may have lofty goals, some flawed thinking and some serious challenges, any attempt at filtering out the fake and filtering in the truth should be supported and at the very least given a chance to see what happens.