Introduction edit
This concept of DataDrivenNews was first mentioned by me on my wiki talk page, here Spread Jnana (Knowledge) and remove A-Jnana (false knowledge/ignorance). The essence of the idea is news should be factual and reliable and not opinionated.
Motivation edit
- Make WikiNews Awesome : Wikipedia is highly revered throughout the world. Although some articles are not as good as others. But team work and consensus give really amazing results. Wikipedia is creating a legacy for mankind for many generations to come. But (in my opinion) Wikinews is nowhere anywhere close. WikiNews has very few people working on it, and very little news as such. Practically it is useless. I have seen no one in India refer/share anything related from wikinews.
- Facebook being used to spread false news : What people share on Facebook and other social networking sites is a bunch of hoax, paid news, conspiracy theories. Some are even so bad, they have potential to even cause havoc[1], and I am not kidding.
- Paid news can sabotage democracy (specially in India) : Paid news in an endemic[2]. Ever since liberalization, the number of news channels has increased like anything and the quality of the news has fallen to unimaginable lows. Some news channel websites are like porn websites. In a later section i will share some case studies of paid-news and their effect.
- In Wikimedia Foundation we trust : Only high quality, well cited and NPoV articles of the wikipedia level can save us. The wiki community is the best place for this to happen.
Ideas ( this is only draft, this section is incomplete) edit
Automatically content generation edit
A bot would crawl all websites and generate ...
Tagging and categorization of each line of news content as a unique topic edit
#Assertion, #Opinion #Fact, #Statement #Survey #Allegation, #Disputed, #Indeterminable, #PersonalExperience, #StatisticalProjection etc. The overall article would be graded accordingly by adding the score of individual statements. The tagging would be done by voting. If consensus is not reached the statement would be marked as #Disputed or #Inderterminable.
Grading : Reliability Factor edit
Individual Reporters, NewsChannels, Survey Agencies, Election Forecast agencies etc will all have their own pages with their reliability score. Reliability score would be based on all the #Assertions they made and how many of them actually conclusively turned out to be true. To give an example -
Linking with Social Media edit
Whenever an news article/page link is shared on facebook, the thumbnail preview will have an overlaw showing the reliability (trustworthiness) of the content being shared which would be calculated based on methods suggested above.
News-Rooms edit
The content will be used by independent blogger, and video-bloggers to have news room discussions and it will be uploaded on Youtube and other websites.
Implementation edit
Option 1 : Edit WikiNews code edit
The entire thing would be implemented in on wikimedia and used in wikinews website.
Option 2: Make an independant project and later merge with WMF edit
The entire code could be implemented as an independent project. Be tested, used, stabalized over 2-3 years. And then it could be merged with WikiMedia Foundation, giving it the control for it's better future.
Assumptions & Risks edit
- WikiMediaFoundation will be supportive and support the idea
- The implementation (software development) would be not very complex
- It will not break the existing wiki structure
- Etc. ... Todo
- ^ Rogers, James (2016-11-11). "Facebook's 'fake news' highlights need for social media revamp, experts say". Fox News. Retrieved 2016-11-23.
- ^ "Press Council of India's report on paid news" (PDF).