Wikitribune - the next great Wales failure

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:53 pm

Dysklyver wrote:
Poetlister wrote:is this wonderful new editor similar to our old friend the Visual Editor?
No it's quite different. I think it's a little like word online, but it's much more basic.

.......which describes EXACTLY what WP needed to develop about 10 years ago.

tim

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 4:55 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:
Dysklyver wrote:
Poetlister wrote:is this wonderful new editor similar to our old friend the Visual Editor?
No it's quite different. I think it's a little like word online, but it's much more basic.
.......which describes EXACTLY what WP needed to develop about 10 years ago.

tim

Yup. But it's not compatible with MediaWiki.

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:22 pm

Honestly, and I know I'm not stating anything everyone here doesn't already know, but this Wikitribune was doomed as soon as Jimbo joined the team. Literally everything he has been associated with for the last ten years has gone into the toilet. I would argue that Wikipedia and the other projects succeeded because he left, not because he was around to help them thrive. Although IMO a good many of the problems in the projects wouldn't exist had he still been involved.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 8:07 pm

Kumioko wrote:Wikitribune was doomed as soon as Jimbo joined the team.

That's a bit backwards. Jimbo started it; he didn't join the team. It was doomed as soon as he conceived it.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 8:25 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Kumioko wrote:Wikitribune was doomed as soon as Jimbo joined the team.
That's a bit backwards. Jimbo started it; he didn't join the team. It was doomed as soon as he conceived it.

Worth noting that Wikipedia wasn't Jimbo's idea. Jimbo's ideas at that time were more... um...

Silvia Saint 001 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], by Bomis.com, from Wikimedia Commons

Graaf Statler · Unread post by **Graaf Statler** » Wed Jul 18, 2018 9:59 pm

Wikipedia is a time picture of how the internet was in these day's. I gave the example of Startpagina.nl before what was also about the same idea in the same era, sharing knowledge. Everything was new and exiting in that time, porn on the internet, people of all over the world who were chatting, sharing knowledge, the sky was the limit. Now this is just as normal as a TV, and Wikipedia a fossil.

It was just stupide to start such a product as Wikitribune nowadays. I really don't think Jimmy was the reason of this failure in a direct way. Because no one had been able to make this concept to a succes. The failure was built-in.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Thu Jul 19, 2018 8:12 pm

Dysklyver wrote:Worth noting that Wikipedia wasn't Jimbo's idea. Jimbo's ideas at that time were more... um...

Yes. I don't know if Bomis was his idea but it was never a great success. Wikipedia wasn't, and by some standards it's a spectacular success. Maybe there's a moral there.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Thu Oct 11, 2018 10:50 pm

My friend Marty mentions that the #2 hired journalist at WikiTribune has left lucrative life as a Jimmy Wales employee to go freelance.

link https://www.responsesource.com/bulletin ... a-morrish/[/link]

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Fri Oct 12, 2018 1:27 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:My friend Marty mentions that the #2 hired journalist at WikiTribune has left lucrative life as a Jimmy Wales employee to go freelance.

link https://www.responsesource.com/bulletin ... a-morrish/[/link]

RfB

Obviously, with her excellent journalistic skills she's learnt enough to realise that this is a smart move.

Doubtless Jimbo will miss her.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Sat Oct 20, 2018 3:47 pm

My friend Marty observes today that effective last week WikiTribune has canned ALL of their professional journalists...

link https://medium.com/@charlesmichio/wikit ... a7efab31c7[/link]

I'm sure fundraising will continue to buy cups of coffee for those hardworking software programmers.

RfB

Eric Corbett · Unread post by **Eric Corbett** » Sat Oct 20, 2018 4:04 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:My friend Marty observes today that effective last week WikiTribune has canned ALL of their professional journalists...

link https://medium.com/@charlesmichio/wikit ... a7efab31c7[/link]

I'm sure fundraising will continue to buy cups of coffee for those hardworking software programmers.

RfB

That's an interesting article that by extension offers some insight into why so many Wikipedia articles are so bad.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Sat Oct 20, 2018 6:18 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:My friend Marty observes today that effective last week WikiTribune has canned ALL of their professional journalists...

link https://medium.com/@charlesmichio/wikit ... a7efab31c7[/link]

Yup, and because they were presumably the ones doing the content review, because the stories are now being moderated by morons.

Literally, they made me a mod. And all I ever do there is insert dubious misinformation about the Trump administration.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Oct 20, 2018 8:13 pm

You say that you have been appointed to the rank of "under construction". When do they think that you will be completed?

Unread post by **tarantino** » Sat Oct 20, 2018 10:13 pm

The last 50 edits on all of wikitribune are two days worth. Compare that with Iridescent's talk page, which received 50 edits in one day.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:41 am

Poetlister wrote:You say that you have been appointed to the rank of "under construction". When do they think that you will be completed?

I could ask on the "coming soon" help-desk.

WhoReallyCares · Unread post by **WhoReallyCares** » Sun Oct 21, 2018 11:41 am

Randy from Boise wrote:My friend Marty observes today that effective last week WikiTribune has canned ALL of their professional journalists...

Were they fired or let go because no funds are left to pay them? I suspect the latter.

IMO, WikiTribune is one of the most pitiful attempts at a news website in the history of the internet.

It's astonishing insofar as it reveals just how useless Jimmy Wales really is.

Even a schoolkid could come up with something better than WikiTribune.

Kingsindian · Unread post by **Kingsindian** » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:27 pm

The end of WikiTribune could make a good blog post. I haven't really been following it, though I'm subscribed to their newsletter. The activity has been quite low.

Unread post by **tarantino** » Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:39 pm

WhoReallyCares wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:My friend Marty observes today that effective last week WikiTribune has canned ALL of their professional journalists...
Were they fired or let go because no funds are left to pay them? I suspect the latter.

IMO, WikiTribune is one of the most pitiful attempts at a news website in the history of the internet.

It's astonishing insofar as it reveals just how useless Jimmy Wales really is.

Even a schoolkid could come up with something better than WikiTribune.

Jimmy and Orit wrote:What we have learned so far

As you may have heard, we’ve made some major personnel changes. We are looking to hire new journalists – our old staff was great, but we are now focussing much more on community support, and so we are looking for journalists with extensive wiki experience, and journalists with fact checking passion. Effectively, what we are doing is inverting completely how people normally think about communities and journalists – the community is not here to merely help the journalists. Rather the journalists will be here to work for the community.

See also Orit's interview on The Drum: WikiTribune restructures around community following editorial exodus. "[Peter] Bale left in April and now the team he helped assemble has followed."

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Tue Oct 23, 2018 2:31 pm

Jimmy and Orit wrote:our old staff was great, but we are now focussing much more on community support

Translation: For various reasons, we couldn't retain the professional journalists. We are now thus reliant on the sort of mugs who edit Wikipedia to do the work.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Tue Oct 23, 2018 4:58 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Jimmy and Orit wrote:our old staff was great, but we are now focussing much more on community support
Translation: For various reasons, we couldn't retain the professional journalists. We are now thus reliant on the sort of mugs who edit Wikipedia to do the work.

He couldn't care less about the product. He only cares about the cash-flow, making sure he gets a return on that big £100 investment...

RfB

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Tue Oct 23, 2018 6:05 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:
Poetlister wrote:
Jimmy and Orit wrote:our old staff was great, but we are now focussing much more on community support
Translation: For various reasons, we couldn't retain the professional journalists. We are now thus reliant on the sort of mugs who edit Wikipedia to do the work.
He couldn't care less about the product. He only cares about the cash-flow, making sure he gets a return on that big £100 investment...

RfB

After his £7 Million loss in The People's Operator stuff-up I daresay he needs it.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:18 pm

Dysklyver wrote:After his £7 Million loss in The People's Operator stuff-up I daresay he needs it.

I doubt that he lost that much. He got quite a hefty salary while it was going.

Unread post by **Midsize Jake** » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:48 pm

I'd assume that whatever stock he still owned in TPO was part of his compensation package, so he probably didn't lose any of his own money. The big loss would have been in terms of personal opportunity cost - just think of all the time and effort he put in there that could have been spent causing some other company to collapse and fail completely.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Oct 24, 2018 2:03 pm

Midsize Jake wrote:I'd assume that whatever stock he still owned in TPO was part of his compensation package, so he probably didn't lose any of his own money. The big loss would have been in terms of personal opportunity cost - just think of all the time and effort he put in there that could have been spent causing some other company to collapse and fail completely.

His big mistake was his failure to get people from all over the world to give their services for nothing and even make donations. After all, that business model has worked elsewhere.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Oct 27, 2018 6:47 pm

Now the sacking of journalists is in The Times.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Mon Nov 19, 2018 10:30 pm

My friend Marty points out that a reputable journalist is now talking about Wikitribune in the past tense in the Columbia Journalism Review...

Ooo, bad timing — the end of year donation blitz is fast approaching...

link https://www.cjr.org/analysis/jimmy-wale ... ribune.php[/link]

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Tue Nov 20, 2018 9:10 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:My friend Marty points out that a reputable journalist is now talking about Wikitribune in the past tense in the Columbia Journalism Review...

Ooo, bad timing — the end of year donation blitz is fast approaching...

link https://www.cjr.org/analysis/jimmy-wale ... ribune.php[/link]

RfB

I'd say that's a misrepresentation of the article. Mathew Ingram certainly thinks it's in trouble, but he doesn't think it's dead. Jimbo does admit to not learning from his mistakes.

If you haven’t heard of WikiTribune, you’re not alone—it hasn’t made a big splash outside hardcore digital-media circles. But it’s an ambitious project, one that was designed to democratize the news as a Wikipedia-style portal where anyone could contribute to and edit news stories. ... Wales tells CJR he hasn’t given up, and that the layoffs were part of a strategy to make the site more user driven. But he admits WikiTribune has also used up most of the money it raised from a crowdfunding campaign and a group of investors, including a $100,000 matching grant from the CUNY-based News Integrity Initiative and $500,000 from Google’s Digital News Initiative. (For the time being, Wales is funding the project himself.) And he acknowledges some early mistakes, including some of the same kinds of errors made in Wikipedia’s early days.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 12:40 pm

Classic Jimbo entrepreneurialism!

He's bankrupted more companies than Donald Trump.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Tue Dec 04, 2018 2:26 pm

Fire the journalists to cut costs!

No wait...

Promise to hire new journalists (if y'all will just give a good ol' boy a little December donation sugar!)!!!

link https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/wikipedi ... ing-staff/[/link]

Our favorite internet entrepreneur wrote:“I very firmly think that citizen journalism can only go so far and there is a need for staff journalists and that a hybrid model is the answer,” Wales (pictured) told Press Gazette.“That hasn’t changed.” * * *

“One of the things we realised is that we had inadvertently created a hierarchical culture that the journalists were above the community and that’s not what the original vision was,” Wales said.

“We had great journalists who were working very hard to empower the community, but the truth is if all of the journalism staff members are admins and none of the community members are admins it’s hard for them to genuinely feel like equals.”

We know who the Super Equal Supreme Decision-maker is, do we not? The guy who decides to hire journalists, and fire journalists, and hire journalists again? The guy who's trying to get some dumb fucking venture capitalist to helicopter him a bale of cash... The Sole Stakeholder, Jimmy Wales!

Don't give us any bullshit about "community" and "equals."

RfB

P.S. Thanks to my friend Marty for the link.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Tue Dec 04, 2018 4:47 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:
“One of the things we realised is that we had inadvertently created a hierarchical culture that the journalists were above the community and that’s not what the original vision was,” Wales said.

Don't give us any bullshit about "community" and "equals."

Jimmy inadvertently slights the whole of wikipedia here.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Tue Dec 04, 2018 5:32 pm

Vigilant wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:
“One of the things we realised is that we had inadvertently created a hierarchical culture that the journalists were above the community and that’s not what the original vision was,” Wales said.

Don't give us any bullshit about "community" and "equals."
Jimmy inadvertently slights the whole of wikipedia here.

After trying to steal Wikinews.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Tue Dec 04, 2018 8:30 pm

Heave forbid that the journalists - the experts - should be treated more favourably in any way than random editors off the street.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 3:50 am

Poetlister wrote:Heaven forbid that the journalists - the experts - should be treated more favourably in any way than random editors off the street.

He needs mass input by unpaid volunteers to make the business model work. Commercial news production has been done and it's not terrifically profitable, putting things mildly.

His idea is actually dead in the water and I wouldn't be surprised if JW hangs a toe-tag on Wikitribune in 2019.

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 12:23 pm

Maybe he can merge it with Wikinews.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 3:54 pm

Everything Jimbo Touches Dies.

It doesn't matter what he does, it's going to suck.
He might be the worst high public profile 'entrepreneur' I've ever seen.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 4:00 pm

Vigilant wrote:Everything Jimbo Touches Dies.

It doesn't matter what he does, it's going to suck.
He might be the worst high public profile 'entrepreneur' I've ever seen.

He's got oodles of blue sky cred from Wikipedia. He parlays that into, ummm, thousands of pounds by coming up with brilliant new ideas and wheedling small change from initial investors.

I'm tempted to compare the parallel career trajectories of both he and Larry Sanger.

RfB

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 4:11 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:
Vigilant wrote:Everything Jimbo Touches Dies.

It doesn't matter what he does, it's going to suck.
He might be the worst high public profile 'entrepreneur' I've ever seen.
He's got oodles of blue sky cred from Wikipedia. He parlays that into, ummm, thousands of pounds by coming up with brilliant new ideas and wheedling small change from initial investors.

I'm tempted to compare the parallel career trajectories of both he and Larry Sanger.

RfB

I'd go with Donald Trump, minus the presidency.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 4:51 pm

Vigilant wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:
Vigilant wrote:Everything Jimbo Touches Dies.

It doesn't matter what he does, it's going to suck.
He might be the worst high public profile 'entrepreneur' I've ever seen.
He's got oodles of blue sky cred from Wikipedia. He parlays that into, ummm, thousands of pounds by coming up with brilliant new ideas and wheedling small change from initial investors.

I'm tempted to compare the parallel career trajectories of both he and Larry Sanger.

RfB
I'd go with Donald Trump, minus the presidency.

.............and the TV show.

Nah, Trump won't lift an undersized pinkie for less than seven figures...

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:01 pm

I understand that he makes a reasonable living from speaking fees. And of course Wikipedia has succeeded in some senses, albeit probably in spite of rather than because of him.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Dec 08, 2018 11:02 am

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said there will be journalists working on his crowd-sourced news website Wikitribune again in the future, despite firing his entire editorial staff last month. “I very firmly think that citizen journalism can only go so far and there is a need for staff journalists and that a hybrid model is the answer,” Wales (pictured) told Press Gazette.“That hasn’t changed.”

Wikitribune, which has been in a pilot phase for just over a year, describes itself as a “news platform that is primarily about volunteers doing neutral, factual, high-quality news” with a “very high degree of transparency and accountability”. It was launched with the aim of being the “first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals writing stories as they happen”.

Press Gazette

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Sun Jan 06, 2019 6:14 am

*sad trombone sound*

2019-01-05_wikitribune-alexa.png

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Jan 06, 2019 10:04 am

Evidently, it's doing much worse outside the USA than inside. No doubt Trump will use this as justification for excluding immigrants from Mexico and the Sudan.

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Mon Jan 07, 2019 12:15 am

Our tiny site is doing better in the US than Wikitribune.
(99,194 Traffic Rank in US)

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Mon Jan 07, 2019 1:45 am

Zoloft wrote:Our tiny site is doing better in the US than Wikitribune.

Give it a couple of years and it might be doing better than Alexa...

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Mon Jan 07, 2019 8:42 am

Is it really surprising?

Jimmy fails businesses like his last name is Trump.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Wed Jan 09, 2019 4:26 am

Jim wrote:
Zoloft wrote:Our tiny site is doing better in the US than Wikitribune.
Give it a couple of years and it might be doing better than Alexa...

The next step is to have Alexa acknowledge the might of the Wikipediocrats through every Amazon Echo device.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Jan 09, 2019 3:09 pm

Is there any way we can get Alexa to consult this site to find the answers to questions? That might produce some intriguing answers!

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Wed Jan 09, 2019 5:04 pm

Poetlister wrote:Is there any way we can get Alexa to consult this site to find the answers to questions? That might produce some intriguing answers!

It's technically possible, but it would require moving away from phpbb and even then it isn't certain that it would happen. Basically if you use structured data to get a Google search snippet to appear for your answer, there is a small chance these home assistant devices will use it.

collect · Unread post by **collect** » Thu Jan 10, 2019 2:36 pm

Poetlister wrote:Is there any way we can get Alexa to consult this site to find the answers to questions? That might produce some intriguing answers!

AFAICT, "Alexa" from Amazon is very marginally related to "Alexa.com" which is a webpage ranking site as one of its aims (the main purpose is to sell services to increase web traffic to your site). Oops - Amazon bought it in 1999, but its "Alexa" is not connected to "Alexa.com". I think they wanted the name even back then.

Unread post by **tarantino** » Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:40 pm

Jimmy's now planning on moving Wikitribune to a mediawiki platform and hire a community journalism engagement liaison.