Intro by Jimmy Wales: “Welcome to WikiTribune, a pilot project for a new approach to journalism where the community is at the center. This is not a news service – yet. It’ll only be the news service I envisage when you play a full role.
When I wrote the very first words in Wikipedia back in January 2001, I chose “Hello, world!”
It is a long standing tradition amongst computer programmers that when you are learning a new programming language, the first thing you do is write a program which says “Hello, world!”
The day I opened Wikipedia to the public, January 15th, 2001, it was not an encyclopaedia – yet. Therefore, that was not the launch of an encyclopaedia.
What was it, then? It was the launch of a project to build an encyclopaedia.
What is this, then? This is the launch of a project to build a news service. An entirely new kind of news service in which the trusted users of the site – the community – is treated as completely equal to the staff of the site – also the community. As with any true wiki, you can jump in and get involved at the highest levels, doing as much or as little as you like to help. As with any successful wiki, there will be detailed discussions and debates by the community to set policy on all the detailed matters that are necessary to build a news service.
My goals are pretty easy to understand, but grand in scope (more fun that way, eh?): to build a global, multilingual, high quality, neutral news service. I want us to be in as many languages as possible as fast as possible. I want us to be more concerned with being right than being first. I want us to report objectively and factually and fairly on the news with no other agenda than this: the ultimate arbiter of the truth is the facts of reality. That’s agenda enough to keep us busy….(More)”.