WikiTribune

» see wikitribune.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Wikipedia is probably the site I have opened more times than any other in twenty-five years of working with computers, and I never once opened WikiTribune. That is not a criticism, it is the whole problem in one sentence. The name carried an enormous amount of trust and the product could not convert any of it, because what makes Wikipedia work is not the software and not the founder.

Jimmy Wales announced it on 25 April 2017 with Orit Kopel, into a moment when every conference panel in the world was about fake news and nobody had a proposal that was not a content-moderation policy. His was structural. Hire real journalists, pay them out of reader donations rather than advertising, and let the community edit their work the way it edits an encyclopedia article. Every piece would publish with its sources attached, including full transcripts of interviews, so a reader could check the reporting against the raw material.

The crowdfunder ran through April and May 2017 and raised more than £137,000 from the public. Around £400,000 more arrived from large donors, Google and Craig Newmark's News Integrity Initiative among them. Roughly ten journalists were hired, Holly Brockwell first, with Peter Bale as the opening editor. The public site went live on 30 October 2017.

The debut article was picked apart within a day for errors and for sentences that did not parse, and some donors asked for their money back. That is a rough first morning for a publication whose entire proposition was accuracy.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The premise deserves a fair hearing because it was not stupid. Wikipedia demonstrated that unpaid strangers will maintain a reference work of extraordinary size for free, and journalism was clearly running out of money at the same time. Putting the two facts next to each other and asking whether one solves the other is a reasonable thing for the person who built Wikipedia to do.

What the premise skipped is that an encyclopedia article and a news story are made under opposite conditions. Wikipedia summarizes what published sources already say, and it can take four years to settle a paragraph. A news story is the part before any of that exists, it requires somebody to make a phone call that nobody else has made, and it is worthless in a week. Volunteers are abundant for the first job and close to nonexistent for the second. Zahera Harb at City University London put the objection more sharply at the time, calling the arrangement exploitation.

~ the cracks ~

By April 2018 the operation was more than £110,000 down with website traffic that barely registered. In October 2018 WikiTribune laid off its entire journalism team and relaunched as a fully community-run site, which is a polite way of saying the expensive half had been removed and the cheap half was asked to carry it.

Wales's own account afterward was more candid than most founders manage. He said the structure and the design had not let the community actually flourish, and that not very much work had gotten done. Both halves of that are true and they compound: without the reporters there was little for volunteers to edit, and without volunteers doing meaningful editing there was no reason to be a wiki instead of a website.

~ what came after ~

In October 2019 Wales launched WT.Social, an ad-free social network funded by donations where people contribute to subwikis, and in November wikitribune.com began redirecting there. The name became a suffix on somebody else's product and then dropped off entirely. WT.Social picked up 400,000 registered accounts by early December 2019, mostly from press coverage about an alternative to Facebook, and the Wikimedia Foundation had to publish a note on 19 November clarifying that it had nothing to do with any of this. In 2023 the whole thing was rebranded again as Trust Café.

The residue is a question the industry still has not answered. Wales was right that advertising had broken the incentives of online news and right that a donation-funded commons can produce something valuable at scale. He was wrong about which kind of labor transfers. Eight years on, the working model for reader-funded journalism turned out to be a named writer with a mailing list, which is the opposite of a wiki in every respect that matters.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »