In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences.

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.


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


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


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.