The founder of Wikipedia created a new project. The platform was called Wikitribune, and has already appeared on the Web. Its goal, Jimmy Wales, will be fighting against fake news, in which professional journalists will team up with an army of volunteers.

As reported by The Guardian, Wikitribune plans to pay reporters, collecting money by road crowing. The circle of issues that the founder of the new media intends to deal with is quite broad - from US and British policy to specialized science and technology. At the same time, the right to vote in the selection of topics and stories will be first of all given to the donors, and the community of readers will check the published facts.

Calling Wikitribune "the news of people and people," Wales said: "For the first time professional and civic journalists will work side by side, on an equal footing, describing what is happening, editing stories live, watching how they evolve, and what kind of reaction is evoked by the society testing And recheck all the facts ".

The long-term future of the new project is provided by a Wikipedia fund of $ 100 million. If the fundraising campaign goes well, Wales hopes to hire the first site journalists before the general elections in the UK on June 8.

Like Wikipedia, Wales's new project will be free for users. The site appeared on the network on April 25 and is now actively attracting donors, from which, ultimately, the work of journalists will depend. Community members will play a key role in the new site, ensuring that the content of the articles will always be supported by as much additional information as possible, including transcripts, video and audio interviews.

Jimmy Wales hopes that the combination of the distributed intelligence of Wikipedia and professional journalism, not based on the "pursuit of clicks", will lead to the creation of a news organization created from scratch to combat fake news. In his opinion, during the years of Wikipedia's existence, she practically did not have to deal with false information: "This is a noisy and not perfect place, but fake news on the Wikipedia community has never been affected".

Jimmy Wales is a member of the Board of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of Guardian. He founded Wikipedia along with Larry Sanger in 2001, and then transferred the entire project to a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, established in 2003. He remains a member of the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation and is the president of Wikia, which allows communities to create their own co-edited encyclopedias.