Presently the leading online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is more or less a household name today when it comes to quick reference for organized information on about anything. Now the man behind that brand, is shifting his attention to a new area: news service.
Mr. Wales in a recent interaction with some members of the press hinted on the plans to launch a news site by name, “Wikitribuneâ€.
The service is expected to address the issue of fake news that so dominates the global media today by providing “factual and neutral†articles on various issues or developments around the world.
Furthermore, in what will certainly be unconventional of a news site, Wikitribune will be both “ad-free and free-to-read†and is to be operated solely on charity donations.
The news site will also share some features of Wikipedia such as the emphasis on writers disclosing the source of their facts as well as a dependence on the general public to maintain accuracy of the contents through unrestricted articles edit.
Commenting on some reasons behind the exemptions particularly that of advertisement, Mr. Wales told the BBC that the model currently used by traditional media – where various ads are featured on a news site, has largely resulted in “chase clicks†which in turn compromises standards.  Â
Moreover, he noted that, “we’re in a world right now where people are very concerned about making sure we have high quality fact-based information, so I think there will be demand for this".
Adding that his team are currently “getting people to sign up as monthly supporters and the more monthly supporters we have the more journalists we can hire. In terms of minimums, if we could only hire two journalists then it would be a blog and not really worth doing. But I would love to start with a lot more - 10 to 20".
However, while Mr. Wales holds a rather assertive view of his model of public editing or quality control, some media experts argue that such approach rather minimizes the chances of best quality news or information as anyone with no guarantee of his or her knowledge-base on a particular subject (or issue) could sit in his room and change the content of the site.
The result of which would be the misleading of the public. As a matter of facts, a good number of college lecturers do not approve of ‘Wikipedia’ as reference for their students when working on class assignments and there are clear indications such attitude may be transferred to Wiki’s brain child – Wikitribune.
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