Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Wikipedia Founder Launches Site to Fight "Fake News"

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a new site called WikiTribune, which will use certain journalists appointed by him to verify stories before they are allowed to be published:

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/04/jimmy-wales-wikitribune/

https://www.wikitribune.com/


This sounds like a stupid idea - everyone has bias, so who's to say these appointees won't have their biases? Also, Wikipedia has only been useful for technical topics that aren't controversial, because as soon as something is in contention, then rival users would keep overwriting each others' statements.

What might work is AI - because at least AI can't intrinsically have any racial, gender, religious or political affiliation or bias. And besides, with so many fretting over being thrown out of work by AI automation, I can't think of a more deserving bunch than the journos (most of whom are Lefties anyway).

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