Wikipedia’s Co-Founder Jimmy Wales, has joined the fight against fake news and launched a new website called Wikitribune. The website aims to bring together journalists and volunteers to ensure that people get fact-based articles that can be easily verified and improved. The Wikitribune website states, “The news is broken and we can fix it. We’re bringing genuine community control to our news with unrestricted access for all. We’re developing a living, breathing tool that’ll present accurate information with real evidence, so that you can confidently make up your own mind.”
Wikitribune aims to ensure that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify, and gives readers a chance to see their sources. The websites hopes that this will give readers the chance to make up their own mind based on the all information at their disposal. The website also aims to make journalists and the community work together. Articles will be authored, fact-checked and verified by journalists as well as community members who will work together as equals.
Wikitribune will be completely ad-free with no one having a vested interest in anything other than offering news. Further, there will be no paywall in order to read articles on the website. User’s are also welcome to flag or fix an article, or submit it for review. The website will instead be supported by readers.
Facebook and Google have already started cracking down on fake news. Google recently announced that it would bring Fact Check to its search globally. When a user searches for something on Google, they would get a result with fact checks for one or more claims. Facebook also rolled out tools that allowed users to flag any fake news stories that they see.