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VICE News

Would You Pay to Fix Fake News?

Wikipedia's co-founder thinks you’ll pay for crowdsourced journalism that's free of fake news

While sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have been plagued with bogus political stories created by Moldovan teenagers and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, Wikipedia, the web's de facto encyclopedia, has remained notably fake news free. As co-founder Jimmy Wales put it in recently in an interview with VICE News, "the phenomenon of fake news has had almost no impact on Wikipedia."

Wales would be first to tell you why: Wikipedia's thousands of volunteer editors and the site's high sourcing standards, he says, are remarkably effective at keeping even contested entries clean.

Now Wales, 50, wants to apply what's worked at Wikipedia to the actual business of news. It's called Wikitribune, which like Wikipedia will depend on its "community" of readers for funding and real-time fact checking, alongside a paid staff of journalists who report, write and fact check stories. The project's tagline: "Evidence-based journalism."

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