Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has announced he is planning to set up an online news site to combat the problem of “fake news”.
Wikitribune will offer factual and neutral articles by using professional journalists and volunteers. The site will eschew traditional advertising revenue in favour of regular donations such as the ones used to support its online encyclopedia.
A demo version of the site, seen by the BBC, declared “the news is broken and we can fix it”.
Mr Wales explained that he believed the advertising-based model used by most of the media had led it to “chase clicks”, which affected standards.
“I think 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,” he told the BBC.
“We’re 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.”
