Mediaboss Marketing

Posted May 02, 2017 15:00:30

Media organisations are having to regain the trust of their audiences as "fake news" spreads and faith in established institutions erodes, according to Wikimedia Foundation executive director Katherine Maher.

The foundation manages the Wiki-branded websites, including online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is among the most visited sites in the world.

Ms Maher said in the era of fake news and "alternative facts" it was critical for websites that spread information to "shore up" trust among their followers.

"With great respect for the press, for a very long time now there has been an assumption of trust," she told News Breakfast.

"What I'm really seeing from many outlets is a conversation that they're having with their readers around what do we need to do in order to regain your trust?

"That's not just about providing transparency into the newsroom or where information comes from, but really thinking about what is it that people are looking for and how can we provide things that actually matter and resonate in their lives in a way that offers value."

Since it was established in 2001, Wikipedia has grown enormously to include more than 40 million articles in more than 250 languages.

One of its defining features is that anyone can edit the articles and it is managed largely by a community of volunteers called Wikipedians who self-regulate entries.

This has led to criticism among academics, particularly that it's not a reliable source on its own, despite its popularity making traditional encyclopedias increasingly obsolete.

Ms Maher said each Wikipedia article relied on citations to secondary sources, including trusted media reports, and she encouraged a healthy level of scepticism among the website's readers.

"We don't think of ourselves as citizen journalists. We know that secondary sources can be wrong," she said.

"The types of sources we want to have in Wikipedia are publications and outlets that engage in fact checking and issue corrections when they get things wrong.

"Even when you have contested facts or contested information, Wikipedia tries to provide you some sort of consensus amidst all that complexity."

Despite Wikipedia's attempts to remain a neutral source of information, it is not immune to exerting a level of control and curation over what information it presents.

Earlier this year, the Wikipedians made the call to ban the Daily Mail as a source that could be cited in articles, arguing it had a "reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication".

Ms Maher acknowledged this was an unusual intervention by the Wikipedia community.

"I use the Daily Mail example with some trepidation because it is one of the only sources that I know that has been explicitly, as a source, currently blocked from being used in Wikipedia articles," she said.

"The way they [the Wikipedians] normally do things is they assess on an individual basis the reliability of a source."

Ms Maher has previously been critical of Facebook for the way it curates what people see, telling news website Value Walk: "When I'm looking at a Facebook feed I don't know why information is being presented to me. Is it because it's timely? Is it because it's relevant? Is it because it's trending, popular, important? All of that is stripped out of context."

She said Wikipedia did not seek to curate or control.

"It's not about maintaining a list of credible sources and a list of blocked sources, which I think is ... the more blunt-force approach we're seeing from social networks," she said.

"We do see different things when we log into social networks, but on Wikipedia you see one version of an article."

Topics: internet-culture, media, australia

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Wikipedia aims for 'consensus and trust' as fake news spreads, boss Katherine Maher says - ABC Online