User:Pi zero/essays/Wikinews in the infosphere

This is a (very) incomplete and preliminary draft.

This is a (very) incomplete and preliminary draft.

	The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.
—Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Modern society, both internet and journalistic, suffers from widespread failure to distinguish between fact and opinion. This failure is a virulent toxin; information providers under its influence teach it to information consumers, and thereby to the next generation of information providers. It undermines information consumers' ability to make well-informed decisions. It corrodes both open wikis and journalism.

Wikinews opposes the toxin. Standing at the intersection of open wikis and journalism, Wikinews demands its contributors separate their own opinions from facts, and report only facts. Wikinewsies routinely write neutral reports while holding strong opinions.

Although open wikis and journalistic outlets may not actively promote this toxin, they often do nothing to discourage it. On the open-wiki side, Wikipedia's initially promising strategy of gradual consensus on weighted representation of opinions has, in the longer term, proved ambiguously anti-realist. On the journalistic side, lack of separation between op-eds and factual news reports provides camouflage for propaganda masquerading as news.

Wikinews uses the open-wiki concept to combat institutional bias and to help spread the meme of separating fact from opinion. It takes many of its policies and practices from the best traditions of journalism. In doing both of these at once, it seeks to reconcile the open-wiki approach with two principles key to journalism, but historically difficult for open wikis: expertise, and trust.

Objectivity

In the struggle between fact and bullshit, Wikipedia does not commit to a side. It does tend to rein in some extreme forms of bullshit. Without something like Wikipedia, nearly all information sources on the internet would be trying to sell something — sell in either a commercial sense or otherwise. The Wikipedian strategy allows the community to gradually develop by consensus a weighted representation of opinions, which cannot eliminate bullshit altogether, but often discourages dominance by particular strains of bullshit. Significant weaknesses of the strategy arise because it is grounded in consensus rather than objective reality: suppression of minority views or sometimes even common sense, uneven fluctuations in quality over time as well as from article to article, and —tellingly— failure to promote an appreciation of the fact/bullshit distinction.

News is fundamentally unsuited to the classical Wikipedian strategy, because the defining characteristic of news is its immediacy.

Expertise

However broad the project, there are always aspects of its operations requiring expertise. Project-operational expertise is primarily considered here, rather than expertise in the subject area of particular content (expertise in architecture, or Middle Eastern politics, or whatever).

Expertise needs to flow in two directions: the project needs to find and deploy expertise from members of the community, and the project needs to communicate expertise to contributors.

• The social structure of Wikinews is geared toward identifying those in the community with expertise — and those worthy of trust, which we'll get to below. Mutual, and self-, criticism with the goal of improvement (i.e., constructive rather than destructive criticism) is the norm, and is encouraged; this is a less-noticed aspect of rejecting "assume good faith" in favor of "never assume".

• The review mechanism explicitly applies the expertise of identified individuals to both quality control, and feedback to writers.

• Capturing expertise and communicating it to contributors is something Wikinews is always looking for better ways to do.

• At present, capturing is mainly through a combination of living tradition (Wikinewsies who know) and project web pages. A few information-rich core project pages, such as the style guide, are surrounded by an unsystematic scattering of material across many other pages, some of them not even in project space (e.g., template documentation). One of the various tasks undertaken by WN:Tips on reviewing articles is providing links back to the primary repositories of various points, but this too has both limited scope and limited target audience.
• At present, the principal means of communication to contributors, besides the {{Howdy}} template and various other encouragements to read the project pages, is the review comments provided on reviews. Over-reliance on review comments during a newcomer's initial learning curve on the project can be labor-inefficient for both writers and reviewers.
• It has long been widely understood that the project needs more effective means of helping newcomers do the right thing the first time, both improving retention of newcomers on the project and improving efficiency of application of available expertise.
• An envisioned set of tools for building interactive wizards could enable gradual construction, over time, of extensive help for writers, eventually capturing much expertise in what would be essentially a community-grown expert system.
• Tools are also needed for aiding reviewers directly.

• Interactive wizarding tools might be designed to allow custom extensions with javascript hooks to perform more sophisticated functions; one could imagine EasyPeerReview, Makelead, and many other similar tools all being relatively painlessly and flexibly implemented by such means. However, the customization facility would have to be carefully designed to prevent the creation of security exploits.
• Some sort of context-sensitive advice system could be useful for both writers and reviewers; this seems likely to be independent of the primary tools provided for interactive wizarding.