Intermezzo #3: WikiTribune
WikiTribune was a news-making platform, following the protocols of Wiki way of collaboration, yet based on the WordPress content management system. This means the posts could be written and rewritten by multiple people, always leaving a trace on the history of the post at the backend, so that anyone who wanted to trace the origins of the source could do so. Contribution to collaborative writing is free and open to anyone, while there are some admin roles distributed to a smaller community. Contributing to WikiTribune is voluntary work, yet the low threshold of access and easy-to-understand interface make the contribution appealing. One can write a whole new piece of news or just edit a broken link, depending on their desired level of engagement. One of the reasons for initiating the WikiTribune was to fight post-truth. The elections in America and the speeches of Donald Trump put the post-truth discussion to the fore. What was being spread as news in the fragmented media ecosystem, including social media, news outlets and online groups, was not necessarily based on facts, but sometimes on conspiracy theories, manipulated half-facts or open lies. By utilising the Wiki way of working, WikiTribune was aiming to generate news collectively similar to Wikipedia as an online encyclopaedia was generated collectively. It was considered that with collaborative editing, the platform would ensure neutrality and fact-based news-making. However, the overall atmosphere in the internet world was too different from 2008 when Wikipedia had taken off.
WikiTribune was launched in October 2017 (nd., 2023) and included several journalists in its core team, who were employees of the WikiTribune company, founded by Jimmy Wales and Orit Kopel. In October 2018, they laid off many of the journalists (Statt, 2018) both as a consequence of the company’s financial loss and of the shift in the platform’s governance structure. Having journalists in the community was raising the bar of professionalism for people to contribute to news-making. It was considered, that without them, a more horizontal scheme for collaboratively writing and editing the news was going to be possible. As it is in Wikipedia, the contribution of more people in the news-making was the main aim behind this (Volpicelli, 2019).
In the fall of 2018 right after the lay-offs, I got to learn about WikiTribune and decided to learn how the platform functioned. I was curious about the digital tools they were using for collaborative editing but also about the governance structure behind it. I joined their Discord channel one day, guessing an anonymous observer would just blend in smoothly. Then I got the welcome message from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, a hero to many people in the FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) world. This was highly encouraging, and I started to spend some more time on the Discord channel. I helped out in dealing with a post from a Turkish person because of my language skills and contributed with a question to the interview with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. But one could see that people were coming along with their hidden or open agendas, their interests could sometimes be in spreading an idea rather than information. Then one news item about Australians eating kangaroo meat became a hot topic. A person kept re-editing the article to his own view about the issue, which was also open to debate since the fact was more about the culture of eating kangaroos rather than its reality. Despite Jimmy Wales and Fiona Apps, an employee of WikiTribune, being totally hands-on on the project, the Discord channel for discussing these conflicts, the very easy interface of collaborative editing, the dissensus on the culture of kangaroo eating was hard to overcome. I do not recall the final decision on the article yet a nuance seemed very important to different persons and in my view, this was an important indicator about the challenges that WikiTribune had to face.
Around the same time, fact-checking became one of the important occupations on the platform. Fact-checking is seen as an important tool in fighting post-truth yet it is proven to be effective to a limited degree (Keane, 2018). The fact-checked news circulates after the first shock and never reaches as many misinformed people as the initially spread fake news, so the efficiency of fact-checking is debatable. Yet, as Wales (Volpicelli, 2019) also pointed out, it can be done easily as desk research, without the necessary skills of a field reporter, nor does it require a press pass or access to special events. Also, the Wiki style of referencing was easing the fact-checking process, not leaving much open to debate, as was the case about the culture of eating kangaroo. Due to other pressing matters, I didn’t keep on following the Discord channel, started to check the website less and less. Then one day I read that the project was transformed into WT.Social, a social media platform which allows the creation of collaborative posts and editing of misleading content (according to https://wt.social/). So WikiTribune was dead, and an attempt to go beyond citizen journalism and initiate collaborative citizen journalism failed.
The reasons behind the failure of WikiTribune may be various but I will only focus on two issues, one more related to microscale and the other to macroscale. On the microscale, in topics related to culture, certain people tend to be more sensitive, thus making a meaningful discussion almost impossible. The fact is obscured by personal sensitivities. Overcoming this is not possible with a governance structure such as Wikipedia, in which highly dedicated community members keep the platform neat and tidy. The politics behind the news is tougher than behind an encyclopaedia, the contested views are harder to bring together and the website did not allow for dissensus or different perspectives in the same news item. As was experienced in the early days of WikiTribune, having a group of professional journalists helped in the fight for post-truth yet became an obstacle in ensuring a great number of contributors collaborating on the platform for news-making. On the macroscale, the overall environment on Web 2.0 affected the success rate of WikiTribune. Jimmy Wales’s words at the launch - “The news is broken, but we figured out how to fix it”- (Wales, 2017) didn’t become true and this is very much related to the news being part of a larger ecosystem of the web 2.0, as himself also argued later on in 2021 (Ferris, 2021) following the transformation of WikiTribune to WT.Social. The attention economy (the financial model of the social media platforms hungry for its users to become addicted to them so that their advertisement revenue increases) made it very hard for people to not only contribute but even to follow WikiTribune. It had no incentives to feed the addictive behaviours of its users or to contribute to their self-gratification, so WikiTribune couldn't survive in the attention economy. Recently releasing its second beta phase on https://wts2.wt.social WT.Social is still alive yet the initial ideals behind WikiTribune are no longer there while the media ecosystem is still very much contaminated with post-truth.
Learning from WikiTribune
WikiTribune aimed to generate factual, neutral and civic journalism through collaborative editing as a knowledge commons. However, conflicting views on cultural topics showed the challenges of consensus-based governance of knowledge commons
Operating without professional journalists enabled civic participation but this also challenged quality control, allowing individual biases to persist. Introducing fact-checking as a solution to overcome these challenges could provide little to no help in creating impact to combat misinformation at scale. This reveals the gap between the scales of civic contributions and global impact.
Insights on the need for inclusive governance, managing diversity, individual vs. collective agency, and situatedness in broader systems are relevant takeaways for the following sections on the architecture of the commons. Overall this case reinforces the idea that the commons require care and maintenance of social relations beyond its governance mechanisms.
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