Good things can happen when a crowd goes to work on trying to figure out a problem in journalism. At the same time, completely crowdsourced news investigations can go bad without oversight — as when, for example, a group of Redditors falsely accused someone of being the Boston Marathon bomber. An entirely crowdsourced investigation with nobody to oversee it or pay for it will probably go nowhere. At the same time, trust in the media is low and fact-checking efforts have become entwined with partisan politics. 
 
 So what would happen if you combined professional journalism with fact checking by the people? On Monday evening, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched Wikitribune, an independent site (not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation) “that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together” in a combination that Wales hopes will combat fake news online — initially in English, then in other languages. 
 
 The site is launching with a crowdfunding campaign to fund the first Wikitribune journalists (the default amount is $10 a month, but users can donate any amount they wish) “with the first issue of Wikitribune following shortly.” The Wikitribune page said that the goal is to hire 10 journalists. 
 
 The idea is that the professional journalists will be paid to write “global news stories,” while volunteer contributors will “vet the facts, helps make sure the language is factual and neutral, and will to the maximum extent possible be transparent about the source of news posting full transcripts, video, and audio of interviews. In this way Wikitribune aims to combat the increasing proliferation of online fake news.” 
 
 Wales had hinted at his thinking behind the project in a February editorial in The Guardian. “If there is any kryptonite to false information, it’s transparency,” he wrote: 
 
 Technology platforms can choose to expose more information about the content people are seeing, and why they’re seeing it. We need this visibility because it sheds light on the process and origins of information and creates a structure for accountability. We need online spaces for open dialogue across a variety of viewpoints. These spaces must be inclusive by design — toxic behavior, including harassment, is unfortunately a fact of the internet. We need ground rules, commitment to verification, civil dialogue and active participation. And we need to apply these principles to all our online activity. The rise of the internet may have created our current predicament, but the people who populate the internet can help us get out of it. 
 
 Crowdsourced news investigations aren’t new, but they’ve mostly been done on a by-story basis. The Guardian did it with an investigation into Parliament’s expenses. Medium’s Ghost Boat was another attempt. And there is also Wikinews, the Wikimedia Foundation’s 13-year-old attempt at crowdsourced current news. That site has not achieved its stated mission of becoming an AP-like, “high quality feed of news free of charge“; on Monday, its top article was a short, three-day-old one about UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s call for a June general election. 
 
 But Andrew Lih, an associate professor at American University and the author of The Wikipedia Revolution, thinks that Wikitribune has a lot more potential, precisely because of its layer of professional journalists. 
 
 “A [true] wiki method is really only applicable or successful in a narrow domain. Wikipedia is successful in this very narrow space of crowdsourcing because it has such firm rules, and does not want or try to be original,” he said. On Wikipedia, deadlines don’t really matter, and it’s a lot easier for a group to write an article with a formulaic and consistent structure than one with a more narrative structure. “WikiNews, being all volunteer, just could not provide the focus and the number of eyeballs.” 
 
 An combined approach like Wikitribune’s can be more successful than WikiNews has been, he said, because it’s a hybrid of the paid and volunteer models. “You have an operational command structure that’s based on full-time staff. The pro journalists and editors provide the supervision on how the story moves forward. The crowd does the heavy lifting on a lot of the combing, sifting, searching, checking. You let the crowd do what the crowd is good at.” 
 
 “Wikitribune is news by the people and for the people,” Wales said in a statement. “This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side by side as equals, writing stories as they happen, editing them live as they develop, and at all times backed by a community checking and re-checking facts.” ||||| Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Jimmy Wales hopes to get enough donations to hire a team of journalists 
 
 Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales is planning a news service that combines the work of professional journalists and volunteers. 
 
 His goal is for Wikitribune to offer "factual and neutral" articles that help combat the problem of "fake news". 
 
 The service is intended to be both ad-free and free-to-read, so will rely on supporters making regular donations. 
 
 One expert said it had the potential to become a trusted site, but suggested its influence might be limited. 
 
 Wikitribune shares many of the features already found in Mr Wales's online encyclopaedia, including the need for writers to detail the source of each fact and a reliance on the public to edit articles to keep them accurate. 
 
 However, while anybody can make changes to a page, they will only go live if a staff member or trusted community volunteer approves them. 
 
 The other big difference is that the core team of writers will be paid, although there may also be instances in which a volunteer writes the initial draft and then a staff member edits it. 
 
 Regular donations 
 
 A demo version of the site, seen by the BBC, declared "the news is broken and we can fix it". 
 
 Mr Wales explained that he believed the advertising-based model used by most of the media had led it to "chase clicks", which affected standards. 
 
 "I think we're in a world right now where people are very concerned about making sure we have high quality fact-based information, so I think there will be demand for this," he told the BBC. 
 
 "We're getting people to sign up as monthly supporters and the more monthly supporters we have the more journalists we can hire. 
 
 "In terms of minimums, if we could only hire two journalists then it would be a blog and not really worth doing. 
 
 "But I would love to start with a lot more - 10 to 20." 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Lily Cole is serving as an adviser to the news site 
 
 The director of Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab, however, suggested Wikitribune's crowdfunded model might limit its potential. 
 
 "There are a variety of people who - if it does this right - will view it as a trusted platform," commented Joshua Benton. 
 
 "But another 10 to 20 people are not going to 'fix the news'. 
 
 "There's certainly a model for non-profit news that can be successful if it's done on a relatively small scale and produces a product that is unique enough. 
 
 "But I have a hard time seeing this scale up into becoming a massive news organisation." 
 
 Mr Wales said he would be "100% hands-on" with the project in its early stages and would be likely to serve as Wikitribune's chief executive for at least a year. 
 
 Image copyright Wikitribune Image caption Journalists must link to the source of a fact or provide full transcripts and recordings of their interviews 
 
 Other advisors to the scheme include: 
 
 Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki 
 
 Journalism lecturer Prof Jeff Jarvis 
 
 US law professor Larry Lessig 
 
 Model/actress Lily Cole 
 
 Although staff members will decide the topics that get written about on a day-to-day basis, funders will get to influence the contents. 
 
 "If you can get together a certain number of people who are interested in Bitcoin [for example] and you flag that when you sign up as a monthly supporter, then we'll hire a Bitcoin person to do the beat full-time," Mr Wales explained. 
 
 "So, it's the monthly supporters who will be able to determine what are the topics we are going to cover. 
 
 "But it is going to be neutral. They can't pick their favourite hack, who pumps forward their agenda. 
 
 "That's part of the editorial control." 
 
 Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning 
 
 Analysis 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jimmy Wales tells Today his site will employ professional journalists but its agenda will be driven by readers 
 
 By Amol Rajan, Media editor 
 
 Jimmy Wales's interest in news media is nothing new. For years he has expressed concern about how to guarantee the future of quality journalism, and even been talked of as a potential investor in existing media companies. 
 
 But when I spoke to him yesterday, it was clear that there was something new - or rather three things - that finally turned his long-standing interest into the reality of Wikitribune. 
 
 The first is what we call fake news. Fake news is a multi-faceted thing, and not altogether new; but it is undoubtedly the case that the deliberate, viral spreading of misinformation, either for commercial or political ends, has radically spiked around some of the big news events of the past year. Moreover, efforts to tackle it have often been pathetic thus far, and less often successful. This really irks Wales, and quite right too. 
 
 The second recent development is the radical shift in online advertising, where the strength of Facebook and Google - who are gobbling up ever more digital advertising dollars - is creating a race to the bottom. "I'm very concerned by the advertising-funded model, which is creating a lot of clickbait", he told me. 
 
 And third, mounting evidence that people are willing to pay for high-quality news. Wales cited New York Times subscriptions and Guardian membership. He might also have mentioned the Financial Times. 
 
 Image copyright Wikitribune Image caption Wikitribune thinks its mix of journalists and volunteers will engender trust 
 
 To address the first two of these developments, Wales is looking to the third: he wants to get users to pay for news, and then play a hugely active role in determining its focus. 
 
 I argued recently that charity is a poor basis for journalism; much better to get users to pay. Wales agrees. He thinks by asking users to invest financially, they are more likely to invest emotionally too. I think he's onto something - but it depends on whether what they get as a result is worth investing in. 
 
 And here's the rub. 
 
 Nobody, but nobody, has as much credibility as Jimmy Wales when it comes to proving the wisdom of crowds exists online, or that the sheer scale of the open web allows knowledge to be shared and chronicled. But can the spirit of public participation that drove an online encyclopaedia also drive online news? 
 
 We don't know, because the fascinating thing about Wikitribune - whose name is redolent of old newspapers - is that it isn't just reinventing the commercial model for journalism: it's reinventing the editorial one too. 
 
 The function of an editor is mainly to select what to put in and what to leave out. News has traditionally been selected by editors, who are gatekeepers and curators. But Wales, who is the founding editor of this publication, doesn't see it like that. "It's more a management role than editorial vision or pursuing an agenda," he told me. 
 
 This is fascinating, and sounds very similar indeed to the arguments Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, deployed when he published a dossier on Donald Trump. 
 
 It is a curious fact that while setting out to save journalism, Jimmy Wales is abolishing one of its most traditional roles. He would argue, of course, that he is giving power back to the audience in a way they have never had before: letting them be the editors, rather than pompous blowhards who think they know best. 
 
 This might discomfort many a grandee in the news profession; but if the man from Wikipedia provides a business model that sustains top notch reporting, they might thank him eventually. ||||| Let's assume that the Fake News issue is a new one. Something that needs tackling - rather than something which has been with us for as long as we've had authority figures seeking to control information. 
 
 To tackle such a problem, you could perhaps start a new source of information for people. Hire a small number of skilled writers and back them up with sub editors and fact checkers. Perhaps make sure they have a network of sources to make sure they are breaking the good stuff. And support them with a small community of people with money, prepared to back it up. 
 
 It's not a radical model. We've had them for a while and grouped such things under the vague term 'newspapers'' for a while. 
 
 But Jimmy Wales' newest venture, WikiTribune may change all that. It's an attempt to drive evidence-based journalism through the cleansing powers of crowdfunding, It's nothing to do with either Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation (though Wales couldn't bear to break with the Wiki part of the portmanteau to prove it). It's further proof of Wales' rather touching belief that we can build communities dedicated to a wider truth rather than to self interest. 
 
 His own Wikipedia example would suggest that it is at least possible. For all its faults, it remains a reliable factual repository on the web. But the community that drives it (rather than the one which uses it) remains small and it is dwindling as the technical challenges of editing become more tricky for a user base which exists more and more on mobile. The early zeal has dwindled and edits and submissions are driven by a small cabal of dedicated editors, holding the fort against an army of PR and digital marketing specialists. 
 
 For all its glories, Wikipedia is not an entertainment, and therein lies Wales' next problem. Look at the news you consume - here, on other sites, on TV and in newspapers. The choices you make are not necessarily the ones that you know are 'right', they are the ones you know will entertain you. In an information economy, news organisations have learned to use celebrity and trite human interest to drive ratings and fuel clickbait. It's become a more serious issue as the news has become more targeted and rather sinister organisations have looked to match personal data to spurious content for political means, but that process works because users yearn to be distracted above their need to be informed. 
 
 In the US presidential election, voters knew that Hillary Clinton wasn't really running a paedophile ring. In the UK, we knew in the Brexit referendum that the NHS wouldn't get an extra £350m but we allowed it to cloud our judgement. The danger is not that we accept at face value what is given to us, but that we consume it at all, rather than 'proper' journalism. 
 
 Which is where Wales hopes he comes in, with his evidence-based journalism. Quite who selects the topics to be covered is unclear, and selection in journalism is a powerful force. Quite what the role of his advisors would be in that process isn't obvious, though we must learn to trust the wisdom of Lily Cole, and what the criteria are for hiring and editing the journalists. And quite how WikiTribune overpowers the competing models in social media and search engine optimisation is a huge question. 
 
 It's easy to be cynical, which is why I have never stopped, but we should wish Wales well. 
 
 Crowdfunding is never as easy as people assume and finding a community who will support the project, financially, for the long term for altruistic rather than selfish reasons will be a challenge. And getting news up that enough people will want to read (rather than ought to) will be an even bigger challenge. 
 
 Evidence-based journalism without an audience is an academic exercise. Evidence-based journalism with an audience would be a huge triumph. ||||| Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is set to launch a community-driven online news service in response to the widespread distribution of deliberately misleading information masquerading as news. 
 
 The project, Wikitribune, will be a hybrid model in which paid journalists will work with a broad network of contributors. “We want to bring some of that fact-based, fact-checking mentality that we know from Wikipedia to news,” Wales says. 
 
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 We need to talk about the internet's fake ads problem Media We need to talk about the internet's fake ads problem 
 
 Wikitribune will be financed through a crowdfunding campaign, launching today, that will determine the size of the initial team. “Humans haven’t fundamentally changed from the way we were 100 years ago or 500 years ago,” Wales continues. “People have a thirst for quality information.” He describes the core editorial mission of the platform as “facts matter” and intends that the site will be able to support “original reporting and investigative journalism”. 
 
 Read next China is creating its own state-funded Wikipedia and has 20,000 people writing it China is creating its own state-funded Wikipedia and has 20,000 people writing it 
 
 “What’s fundamentally interesting is to get money to journalists to go out and research news stories,” Wales says. “One of the things that community guidance can do is to help figure out what do we not know? What are the things we need to know? Then you’ve got a lot of minds thinking about and discussing that this is the piece of the puzzle that needs more research.” 
 
 “We want to bring [the] fact-based, fact-checking mentality we know from Wikipedia to news” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia 
 
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 In the 16 years since the launch of Wikipedia – which is the fifth most visited website in the world, with more than 41 million articles in nearly 300 languages, garnering around 17 billion monthly pageviews – Wales has developed an understanding of how communities and volunteer networks can coalesce around projects of mutual interest. Hoping to launch in “as many languages as possible as quickly as possible”, he believes Wikitribune will follow a similar user-led model, where the platform’s journalists are directed to subjects and stories. 
 
 “If we have a community guiding the work and we have people who are paying to be monthly supporters we can do the numbers and say, well for this many monthly supporters we can hire another journalist,” Wales says. “Which means if a group wants us to hire a journalist on a particular topic, whatever that might be, then we can do that.” 
 
 WIRED 
 
 Read next WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for May 1 WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for May 1 
 
 Wales’s belief is that programmatic advertising has intensified “a race to the bottom” and led to some media organisations being unsustainable because of the high costs associated with news gathering. According to the trade association Digital Content Next, 90 per cent of growth in digital ad revenue over 2015 went to Facebook and Google, technology companies that don’t invest in journalism but have played a crucial role in the distribution of wilful misinformation during election cycles in western democracies. This shift has meant that media owners must now experiment with other revenue models, moving away from display advertising to subscription, where users are given access to material across a number of platforms. 
 
 Subscribe to WIRED 
 
 “Subscriptions to the New York Times have gone through the roof in the last year or so,” Wales says. “To me, this is really exciting because that business model of people paying is much healthier than a pure ads business model. A lot of editors and journalists and owners of magazines and newspapers have been uncomfortable and are saying ‘we’re looking at this as a business model that’s driving us to clickbait – that’s not what we want to do, that’s not what our brand is about’. It’s exciting to me if more and more people will pay to subscribe.” 
 
 “When Kellyanne Conway said ‘alternative facts’, I was just like ‘fuck it, I can’t deal with this. We have to do something about this’” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia 
 
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 As a renowned technology entrepreneur, it would have been relatively straightforward for Wales to have raised capital for Wikitribune from investors, but he says he feels more comfortable funding the platform via a community model, firstly because it removes the needs for returns, and secondly because it’s more in tune with the paradigm established by Wikipedia. “This just feels right,” he says. “If we’re doing news with community involvement it should be funded by community involvement.” 
 
 Wales adds that he’s been mulling the platform for some time, with its realisation becoming a more tangible prospect with the election of President Donald Trump. Wales had been willing to withhold judgment of the fledgeling presidency for 100 one days out of deference, tradition and a sense of fair play, assuming good faith on the part of the incoming head of state. His patience lasted 48 hours after the inauguration when one of Trump’s advisors appeared on the Sunday morning politics programme Meet the Press to discuss the disputed numbers of people attending the inauguration in Washington DC. “It was when Kellyanne Conway said ‘alternative facts’,” Wales explaines, “and I was just like ‘fuck it, I can’t deal with this. Are you kidding me? We have to do something about this.’” 
 
 Update 25.04.2017: The exclusive reference in this piece was updated to make it clearer that the video was an exclusive. ||||| Let's assume that the Fake News issue is a new one. Something that needs tackling - rather than something which has been with us for as long as we've had authority figures seeking to control information. 
 
 To tackle such a problem, you could perhaps start a new source of information for people. Hire a small number of skilled writers and back them up with sub editors and fact checkers. Perhaps make sure they have a network of sources to make sure they are breaking the good stuff. And support them with a small community of people with money, prepared to back it up. 
 
 It's not a radical model. We've had them for a while and grouped such things under the vague term 'newspapers'' for a while. 
 
 But Jimmy Wales' newest venture, WikiTribune may change all that. It's an attempt to drive evidence-based journalism through the cleansing powers of crowdfunding, It's nothing to do with either Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation (though Wales couldn't bear to break with the Wiki part of the portmanteau to prove it). It's further proof of Wales' rather touching belief that we can build communities dedicated to a wider truth rather than to self interest. 
 
 His own Wikipedia example would suggest that it is at least possible. For all its faults, it remains a reliable factual repository on the web. But the community that drives it (rather than the one which uses it) remains small and it is dwindling as the technical challenges of editing become more tricky for a user base which exists more and more on mobile. The early zeal has dwindled and edits and submissions are driven by a small cabal of dedicated editors, holding the fort against an army of PR and digital marketing specialists. 
 
 For all its glories, Wikipedia is not an entertainment, and therein lies Wales' next problem. Look at the news you consume - here, on other sites, on TV and in newspapers. The choices you make are not necessarily the ones that you know are 'right', they are the ones you know will entertain you. In an information economy, news organisations have learned to use celebrity and trite human interest to drive ratings and fuel clickbait. It's become a more serious issue as the news has become more targeted and rather sinister organisations have looked to match personal data to spurious content for political means, but that process works because users yearn to be distracted above their need to be informed. 
 
 In the US presidential election, voters knew that Hillary Clinton wasn't really running a paedophile ring. In the UK, we knew in the Brexit referendum that the NHS wouldn't get an extra £350m but we allowed it to cloud our judgement. The danger is not that we accept at face value what is given to us, but that we consume it at all, rather than 'proper' journalism. 
 
 Which is where Wales hopes he comes in, with his evidence-based journalism. Quite who selects the topics to be covered is unclear, and selection in journalism is a powerful force. Quite what the role of his advisors would be in that process isn't obvious, though we must learn to trust the wisdom of Lily Cole, and what the criteria are for hiring and editing the journalists. And quite how WikiTribune overpowers the competing models in social media and search engine optimisation is a huge question. 
 
 It's easy to be cynical, which is why I have never stopped, but we should wish Wales well. 
 
 Crowdfunding is never as easy as people assume and finding a community who will support the project, financially, for the long term for altruistic rather than selfish reasons will be a challenge. And getting news up that enough people will want to read (rather than ought to) will be an even bigger challenge. 
 
 Evidence-based journalism without an audience is an academic exercise. Evidence-based journalism with an audience would be a huge triumph. ||||| Last year we saw a proliferation of disinformation online. “Fake news” sites interfered with political discourse and sentiment around the world. Filter bubbles limited our perspectives. Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its international word of the year. As we started 2017, we heard new terms, such as “alternative facts”. 
 
 'Post-truth' named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries Read more 
 
 It’s tempting to wonder: is this the beginning of the end of reliable information? Were the hopes for an open and inclusive web misplaced? Is this the dark age of the internet? 
 
 The spread of false information online is a real threat. The decline of our fact base undermines our capacity to have meaningful conversations and solve problems across the globe. 
 
 But the internet has always been a messy and complicated place. Users have long ranged from those committed to finding and sharing truth to those intent on pranks, vandalism and worse. Instead of fake news articles on your cousin’s social media feed, the 1990s saw your older relatives finally get online, only to start emailing the entire family hoaxes with “Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd:” in the subject line. Yesterday’s fake news travelled via email because that’s the main way people communicated online. 
 
 The internet has always been a place for experimentation and ingenuity. Its power comes from its participants. For every harmful action online, there are countless positive contributions by people seeking to connect with one another, express themselves, and expand our shared knowledge base. 
 
 I’m an optimist. I had to be to start Wikipedia, a project that sounded impossible 16 years ago. How could we get millions of people to work together, across borders and perspectives, without pay, to build a reliable, accurate encyclopedia? But it worked. 
 
 While fake news is not new, delivery methods have evolved. Social media feeds, doctored videos and instant messaging have largely replaced email as the main vehicles for wrong information. Today’s internet is much vaster and more linked, and moves much more relentlessly than it did at the turn of the century. Last year in India, when a new 2,000 rupee bill was introduced, fake news claimed that the bill was equipped with a surveillance chip. Later debunked, the “news” spread like wildfire on the messaging platform WhatsApp, which has 50 million monthly users in India. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters 
 
 The question is: how do we, as consumers and institutions, respond? 
 
 In restoring our common fact base, legacy media organisations (newspapers, television networks, book publishers) have a crucial role to play. Venerable journalistic institutions have extraordinary reporting, research and marketing resources at their disposal, and must redouble their efforts to remain trusted public mediators of what is true. Given the ideological polarisation of the media and filter bubbles on social media, this is a tall order. 
 
 Fake news sites seemingly evolve overnight. Many have the same layout style as legitimate newspaper websites, but lead with alarming headlines that bait readers to click and immediately share. Even if they don’t recognise the source by name, the visuals can look legitimate enough for a casual reader not to notice. 
 
 In this messy age, we need new tools to distinguish truth from falsehood across the digital sprawl. Many social and digital platforms are trying to address the problem by creating algorithms that can identify fake sources, but what’s missing from this solution is the human element. 
 
 Everyone can agree that social platforms need to do something when falsehoods are being shared millions of times, but none of us is comfortable with the social media giants deciding what’s valid or not. It’s impossible to automate fully the process of separating truth from falsehood, and it’s dubious to cede such control to for-profit media giants. What’s needed is human solutions that rely not just on third-party fact-checking bots but on the power of collaboration. We need people from across the political spectrum to help identify bogus websites and point out fake news. New systems must be developed to empower individuals and communities – whether as volunteers, paid staff or both. 
 
 To tap into this power, we need openness. Consider the open-source software movement. Beginning in the 1980s, communities of software developers released code under open licences that allowed other developers to access, reuse and improve code, leading to innovation at scale. Open source showed us that, as the developer Eric Raymond put it, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. Today, some of the world’s most popular technologies are open source. 
 
 Wikipedia has some lessons to offer the builders of new systems. Its editors sift through the online cacophony to differentiate reliable sources from those who traffic in falsehoods. They produce massive amounts of accurate content through an open model. Anyone in the world can add material to articles; anyone can challenge that material and start a discussion. This means more eyeballs on more information and more accountability. No matter what their political leanings, editors have to play by the same rules in creating, refining and fact-checking content: verifiability, neutrality, and no original research. On the discussion pages behind every article, differing viewpoints are displayed. 
 
 By being exposed to this process, people can become more balanced and information more reliable over time. A recent Harvard Business School study found that with more revisions and moderators volunteering on the platform, bias and inconsistencies wore away and that editors tend to become less biased over time. 
 
 If there is any kryptonite to false information, it’s transparency. Technology platforms can choose to expose more information about the content people are seeing, and why they’re seeing it. We need this visibility because it sheds light on the process and origins of information and creates a structure for accountability. We need online spaces for open dialogue across a variety of viewpoints. These spaces must be inclusive by design – toxic behaviour, including harassment, is unfortunately a fact of the internet. We need ground rules, commitment to verification, civil dialogue and active participation. And we need to apply these principles to all our online activity. 
 
 The rise of the internet may have created our current predicament, but the people who populate the internet can help us get out of it. Next time you go back and forth with someone over a controversial issue online, stick to facts with good sources, and engage in open dialogue. Most importantly, be nice. You may end up being a small part of the process whereby information chaos becomes knowledge. And you will be helping eradicate fake news at the same time. ||||| Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. 
 
 Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign. 
 
 Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology. 
 
 Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on. And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and subedit published articles. 
 
 Describing Wikitribune as “news by the people and for the people,” Wales said: “This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals writing stories as they happen, editing them live as they develop, and at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts.” 
 
 Although the site is launching at the beginning of the UK general election campaign, Wales said the impetus for the project came from the US. 
 
 Wikipedia launching $100m fund to secure long-term future as site turns 15 Read more 
 
 “Someone I know convinced me to give Trump 100 days before making my mind up,” he said, “but then on day one Kellyanne Conway came out and said her ‘alternative facts’ line. That was when I really decided to move forward.” 
 
 If the fundraising campaign goes well, Wales hopes to be able to hire the site’s first journalists “as soon as possible” – perhaps before 8 June, when Britons vote in the general election called by prime minister Theresa May. 
 
 Like Wikipedia, Wales’s new project will be free to access. The publication is launching on Tuesday 25 April with a crowdfunding campaign pre-selling monthly “support packages” to fund the initial journalists. The first issue will follow soon after. 
 
 The community contributors will play a key part in the new site, ensuring that the contents of the articles are always supported by as much extra information shared with the readers as possible. 
 
 They will be backed up by a presumption of transparency in the site’s reporting, with journalists sharing full transcripts, video and audio of interviews. 
 
 He hopes that a combination of the distributed intelligence of Wikipedia and measured professional journalism driven by a business model “that’s not about chasing clicks” will lead to a news organisation built from the ground up to combat fake news and political rabble-rousing. 
 
 Baroness Rebuck and Jimmy Wales join Guardian Media Group board Read more 
 
 There is a third way, he said, between the two models “of he said, she said faux neutrality, or having a Paul Dacre [editor of the Daily Mail] agenda and ramming things down our throats”. 
 
 He added: “If you take a look at Wikipedia, it’s noisy and not a perfect place, but for true fake news, there’s been almost no impact on the Wikipedia community. 
 
 “The volunteers are experienced enough to know it’s nonsense, and have an ethos saying: ‘No, we’re here for neutral facts’: that community knows it from the ground up.” 
 
 Those contributors who also support the site financially will eventually be able to advise on the topics they want Wikitribune to explore, Wales said. 
 
 “If you take as an example the bitcoin community, they’re a very active and obsessed community. 
 
 “There’s a lot of news that comes out in the field, and I think they’d love to be able to raise money to hire a journalist and put them on the bitcoin/blockchain beat.” 
 
 The ideas behind Wikitribune are similar to other experiments with sustainable community journalism. 
 
 Google accused of spreading fake news Read more 
 
 Dutch news website De Correspondent, for instance, was launched in 2013 after a €1m (£850,000) crowdfunding campaign, with a goal of focusing on reporter-led in-depth coverage of a select few topics backed up by strong involvement from a community of financial backers. 
 
 In March, the site announced a push into the US market, funded by a $515,000 (£400,000) grant from a number of digital news charities. 
 
 But Wales thinks that such comparisons do Wikitribune down. “I’m not sure that anyone’s ever been as radical as I am,” he said. 
 
 With the power of online transparency, together we can beat fake news | Jimmy Wales Read more 
 
 “Realistically, in terms of saying the community can really have control, a lot of people from traditional newsrooms have really had trouble getting their head around that.” 
 
 Wales, who sits on the board of Guardian Media Group, the Guardian’s parent company, founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, before donating the entire project to a non-profit organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, that he set up in 2003. 
 
 He remains a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, and is the president of Wikia, a Wikipedia spin-off that allows communities to make their own collaboratively-edited encyclopaedias on topics ranging from Top Gear to Harry Potter. ||||| Draft 
 
 According to Columbia Journalism Review WikiTribune is effectively dead. “Nupedia was top down and very controlled,” he says. “It was a seven-stage process just to get anything published, and so...
– "The news is broken and we can fix it." That's the lofty promise of Wikitribune, a new "living, breathing tool" launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales that he hopes will combat "fake news" by teaming ace journalists with citizen volunteers. "I'm not sure that anyone's ever been as radical" in coming up with an idea for "sustainable community journalism," Wales tells the Guardian, explaining the volunteers will help write, fact-check, and flesh out articles on a range of topics without "chasing clicks." The site—looking to initially hire 10 or so reporters before its first issue—will be ad-free (and free for readers), and Wales is crowdfunding to raise money to pay reporters. Donors will have a say in its direction, including what articles will appear. "It was when Kellyanne Conway said 'alternative facts' and I was just like 'f--- it ... we have to do something about this," Wales tells Wired. The site uses the Wikipedia model, displaying sources—meaning "you can make up your own mind," without facts that are tainted by bias, taken out of context, or "just plain … made-up," per the site. Wales tells the Guardian that Wikipedia itself is "not a perfect place," but he adds it also hasn't been overrun by fake news. "If there is any kryptonite to false information, it's transparency," Wales recently wrote in the Guardian. A Dutch site has ventured into similar crowdsourcing. An American University professor tells Nieman Lab that Wikitribune could succeed because it's a hybrid and because of its "narrow domain." But Nieman Director Joshua Benton tells the BBC that "I have a hard time seeing this scale up" and that "another 10 to 20 people are not going to 'fix the news.'" (HuffPost UK wonders if anyone will read it.)