“Jimmy’s frame of reference about journalism is that it’s easy, it’s just a nice turn of phrase. That comes from believing that the wiki-way means you can do anything.” Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In 2017, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales – the Wikipedia cofounder whose plaintive face used to haunt the free encyclopedia’s homepage during fundraising campaigns – decided to save journalism. As an avid consumer of news, The Guardian board member, and all-around internet wise man, he had noticed some alarming trends in the media industry: the advertising-based revenue model was starving online news outlets while pushing them towards clickbait sensationalism; bias and partisanship were rife, which made the general public increasingly distrustful of the media; alternative sources and outright “fake news” were mushrooming.

“The news is broken,” Wales said in a video published in April 2017. “But we figured out how to fix it.” The fix was Wales’s latest brainchild: a news site called WikiTribune. WikiTribune’s formula would be a blend of traditional journalism and the crowdsourcing ethos that underpinned Wikipedia. A team of ten professional journalists would work with an online community of volunteer contributors to report, write, edit, fact-check, and develop news stories. Its guiding principles would be neutrality, accuracy and clarity. Despite its name, the site wouldn’t be structured as a traditional wiki, but as a Wordpress platform – an arrangement that gave the paid editorial staff a modicum of control over what would get published on WikiTribune’s home page.


WikiTribune was Wales’ own for-profit venture, unaffiliated with the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that is in charge of Wikipedia. Wales says he adopted the for-profit structure in order to be swifter and more flexible in WikiTribune’s management. “[Wikimedia’s] collaborative decision-making model is very slow,” he says. “It doesn't lend itself at all to top-down decision-making.” Like Wikipedia, though, WikiTribune had no paywall and ran no ads, relying uniquely on readers’ support – either as one-off or monthly donations – to fund journalists and resources. That many people would be ready to pay for a fledgling collaborative journalism startup – with so much news already being freely available on the web – might have struck some as very optimistic. Yet, an initial crowdfunding round raised at least £137,000, complemented by grants from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund (£340,000), Craig Newmark, and The News Integrity Initiative (up to £75,000).

WikiTribune launched in late October 2017, in an office space on the 22nd floor of the Shard skyscraper in central London. Six months later, in April 2018, the company reported over £110,000 in losses. In October 2018, WikiTribune laid off all its editorial staff. In a post published on the website shortly after the layoffs, Wales and his co-founder Orit Kopel explained the “major personnel changes” as part of a wider shake-up aimed at empowering the website’s community.

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“One of the most challenging things has been to get the software and culture right to encourage participation,” the post read. “We are still working through the site and finding vestiges of the clearly wrong perception that the journalists are ‘above’ the community, supervising their work. This was never the intention and it is something we got wrong in the early design.”

Wales and Kopel announced some design alterations that allowed contributors to start writing or edit a story more swiftly. Of necessity, articles would not be green-lighted by staff journalists anymore, but checked and edited by the community as a whole. This was still an experiment, Wales and Kopel underlined, subject to tweaks and rethinks if need arose: “Our goal is to stay in ‘pilot’ for another six months to a year and then move to ‘beta’.”


Following the failure of its journalism-led operation, Wales has tweaked WikiTribune to focus on crowdsourced fact-checking Screenshot

When I meet him in the lounge of a members’ club in Mayfair, Wales is perched on a plush sofa, and energetically tapping away on his MacBook’s keyboard. He is wearing trainers, thick-framed glasses, and a stubble that almost graduates to beard. He is in high spirits: WikiTribune’s next big initiative – a fact-checking wiki, run in parallel with the main news site – will be kick-started in a few weeks. But I want to understand what went wrong, first.

At its launch, in 2017, WikiTribune was the cynosure of several media shindigs and technology conferences (including a WIRED event). It was lionised as the future of news, a beacon of hope in the post-truth era. Fast forward to our meeting in February 2019, and traffic to the site is grim (its Alexa ranking has plunged by over 188,286 positions in the past three months), downloads for its Android app are in the three-digit ballpark, and contributors are publishing thinkpieces with such headlines as “WikiTribune Dead?” and “WikiTribune: a community contributor's concerns” on the platform. How did it happen?

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“I can't claim we've taken the world by storm,” Wales says, graciously. He proffers a historic analogy: Nupedia. That was the name of a project Wales co-founded in 1999, about one year before launching Wikipedia. Like its successor, Nupedia was an online encyclopedia, whose articles were created by volunteers; unlike Wikipedia, it required contributors to be experts in the subjects they wrote about, and was predicated on a seven-step peer-review process overseen by Wales’s fellow co-founder, Larry Sanger.


“As it turned out, it was very intimidating for the volunteers: it was very hard to write something,” Wales says. “We were having people faxing in their CVs to show they were qualified before we approved them to write an entry.” By the time of its discontinuation in 2003, Nupedia had produced 25 articles. In 2001, when Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia – open to anyone to edit regardless of expertise – it reached the same number of articles in two weeks.

WikiTribune as it was launched in 2017, Wales says, was like Nupedia. Volunteers who wanted to write a story would have to work with one of the ten professional journalists in a back-and-forth that, Wales thinks, might have been off-putting.

“We had a culture of what I would call ‘permission-asking’,” Wales says. “We didn't have the ownership culture that you need in a wiki.” By implication, post-layoffs WikiTribune is much more like Wikipedia: there are no experts calling the shots. Drafts can be initiated by any registered user, and they will immediately appear on the homepage – even if they are clearly marked as draft until fact-checked and edited by the community and approved by a user with superior account privileges.

Wales suggests that such an arrangement will speed things up. “The journalists were doing a fantastic job, but I think we were too journalist-heavy in the early days,” he says. “Community members had to submit their work through a process of approval that was slow, and intimidating, and not collaborative.”

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I am perplexed. Isn’t a community-driven editing process, which involves pooling the abilities and points of view of several amateur journalists, slower almost by definition? Wales ponders the matter. “It’s even slower, yeah,” he says. “But the feedback is faster, if that makes any sense: other people can jump in and participate with you, rather than you submit it while the ten journalists check it in London.”

Wales seems to read WikiTribune’s financial tribulations through the lens of community-building: the top-down culture he initially engineered had spooked online contributors and stunted the community, and that had meant that not enough people were sufficiently invested in the project to keep it alive with donations. (Grants could only help so much: the Google fund, for instance, cannot be awarded twice to the same organisation.)

Some of WikiTribune’s former journalists believe that problems ran deeper than that – starting with the project’s initial proposition of repurposing the wiki model for journalism.

Peter Bale, a journalist who joined WikiTribune as launch editor in 2017, says that the conceit that online volunteers could be on equal footing with professional journalists proved much harder after the launch. Contributors could not get interviews with national politicians, get accreditation for press events, or navigate the minutiae of libel law. Some stories, like the anti-gun protests in the US, or the drip-drip of developments about the Skripal poisoning, were easier to cover for contributors; most were not. “For the general public [collaborating to WikiTribune] it's hard to do reporting – and for no money, which is a big ask,” Bale says.

According to other former staffers (who asked not to be named), that was not the project’s only miscalculation. They paint a picture of generalised improvisation and lack of direction, in which founders scrambled to chart a way forward while failing to grasp the practicalities of journalism and news-gathering. Wales wanted to rescue journalism, but, to his team, it was not clear whether he understood journalism in the first place.

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“Jimmy’s frame of reference about journalism is that it’s easy, it’s just a nice turn of phrase,” Peter Bale says. “That comes from believing that the wiki-way means you can do anything.”

On that – the idea that you can cook salvation just by adding a few drop of wiki-sauce – Bale and Wales sometimes found themselves at loggerheads. One sticking point was Wales’ fondness for “neutrality”. Wales had laid it down as one of WikiTribune’s key tenets, essential to differentiate the project from the clickbaiters and redtops he blamed for ruining journalism. The question was whether “neutrality” could be replaced with “journalistic objectivity”, or it required a completely anodyne approach to reporting. Bale favoured the former, Wales insisted on the latter.

“There is a difference between objectivity and neutrality,” Bale says. “Keeping an absolutely neutral tone of voice is difficult in journalism: journalism without judgement is not journalism." Bale says that facts need be put in context, explained, challenged; false balance – as in quoting a climate change-denier for every climate scientist – has to be avoided. (Bale recalls an instance in which Wales bluntly criticised the headline of a story expounding on Facebook’s privacy failures for being “too opinionated”.)

Wales seems to have half-forgotten those discussions. “I'm so firm in my view [about neutrality] that I don't really hear arguments to the other side,” he says. “I think people don't understand me, so I can't even remember.”

Granted, the neutrality versus objectivity debate is not clear-cut. Arguably, a perceived blurring of the boundaries between journalistic judgement and bias accounts for at least some of the rampant mistrust of the media Wales intended to address with WikiTribune.

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In an Ask me Anything session Wales held on Reddit ahead of WikiTribune's debut, more than one participants bristled at the mention that professional journalists would be involved; “How do you ensure they themselves remain unbiased?,” a Reddit user asked Wales. That hostility might be mostly due to the anti-expertise blizzard sweeping the globe – but Wales was answering a genuine question when he resolved to put online amateurs in charge of the news. Plus, he possessed the right internet street cred for having a crack at solving the conundrum.

Has he succeeded? Clearly not. “Will he succeed?” is a more interesting question. The answer is: “what at?”

No mainstream outlet – or fringe outlet, for that matter – would lose sleep over the current, journalist-free version of WikiTribune. Its front page has a sandbox feel, where drafts and live stories are featured side by side. Almost all of them appear to be second-hand rehashes of news items published elsewhere. (Sources are all listed next to each article, as are notes and transcripts of original interviews.) The most recent published article – as of April 10 – was headlined “The rate of emergency department presentations for suicidal behaviour nearly doubles in U.S. youth between 2007 and 2015, new research finds.”

Yet, there are no journalists to be paid, so Wales can keep experimenting. And his latest idea (the one he really wanted to tell me about) might actually have some legs. It is a MediaWiki, a repository where one can search and find all the fact-checks – both by WikiTribune and by other outlets – on a given topic, such as the US-North Korea negotiations, or person, such as Bernie Sanders.

It is easy to see why Wales picked fact-checking to give WikiTribune a shot in the arm. It remains one of the easiest things to do for the volunteer contributors that have a hard time getting interviews and access. ”Fact checking articles can often – but not always – be done as pure desk research,” Wales says. Fact-checking is also true to WikiTribune’s original mission of eradicating fake news. Most importantly, the MediaWiki is a wiki – and that really chimes with Wales’s worldview.

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Can wiki-based, crowdsourced fact-checking work? There is, of course, a risk of manipulation at the hands of malicious actors and internet trolls – but the idea per se is not necessarily unviable.

”Crowdsourcing has lots to offer to fact-checking, particularly in detecting misinformation, collecting evidences useful in debunking and fact-checking processes, and amplifying the findings,” says Baybars Örsek, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network. So a wiki approach to fact-checking could work, but Örsek underlines the importance of having a clear approval process – and ideally an editor making the last call. That might be addressed – how quickly and how effectively is an entirely different matter – by the same rules that have kept Wikipedia relatively resistant to egregious manipulation and hoaxes over the last 18 years.

Right now, the MediaWiki is built on top of the main WikiTribune WordPress site, and fact-checks themselves – before being linked to in the wiki – are written as articles on WikiTribune. Even if Wales’s declared long-term plan is to hire other journalists once the community has grown, it is conceivable that, over time, the fact-checking side of the website will devour the original news operation.

If the devouring happens, what Wales will end up with is a wiki with a particular focus on news, and with some room for original research. (Sometimes, to settle the matter, Wales says, fact-checkers need to ask the opinion of experts.) A sort of Wikipedia reloaded. And Wikipedia itself is already reporting news: its article about the Christchurch mosque shooting, on March 15, was created just 28 minutes after the terrorist opened fire. In the hours after the attack, the page was updated at a rate of one edit a minute; today it as a painstakingly comprehensive account of the attack, its lead-up, and its aftermath. It’s the news – Wikipedia style.

At the end of our conversation. I ask Wales whether he would like to review his motto – “the news is broken, but we figured out how to fix it”. That surely sounds too ambitious: WikiTribune could possibly, in the future, contribute to improve the field of crowdsourced fact-checking. Maybe that is a better catchphrase.

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“But it’s not a very good slogan to sign people up, ‘We might have a little impact on one small part of news’,” Wales says, with a smile. “I have to give people the vision of what's wrong with the world – and what we want to work on.”

Updated 16.04.19, 16:10 BST: Not all WikiTribune staff were laid off. A clarification has been made regarding comments Jimmy Wales made about the differences between citizen journalism and professional journalism.

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