On Friday-Saturday April 8-9 I participated in the The Huffington Post and Change.org Editors Lab] with Richard Knipel (user:Pharos) and a new friend, Pablo Duboue introduced to me by user:JeremyB. The theme of the event was, “Impact Journalism”, with the question to address being, “How can news organizations develop innovative and interactive ways to create impact by connecting audiences with issues they care about?”
I was invited for my relationship with Consumer Reports and Open Knowledge, but was representing Consumer Reports. I needed a team of three, and as it happened, it seemed better for me to join with two other Wikipedians and do a project that advanced interests of Consumer Reports, Wikipedia, Open Knowledge, and the hackathon target. Our project did not qualify with a ranking. First I will describe the winning projects, then our project, then the event generally.
Winning projects
The other projects are better explained on their own project pages. Please excuse any misunderstandings I have in presenting them.
The team from Mic won with their project called “Offsite“. Offsite is a concept for an advertising system which presents a link or tool to the second-tier social media platforms, including change.org, eventbrite, and kickstarter. The idea is that social media platforms of this tier need a tool which interfaces with their APIs so that if someone wanted to generate ads from a given project on their platforms, then a tool like offsite could be readily placed wherever an ad might normally be placed except that it can be made to safely and clearly direct the readers to these other social media platforms. I like this concept because it imagines that there is a level of social media platforms which could be imagined as a collective and peers to each other, and that they could share a tool for other websites to direct to anywhere in the collective. I also like the idea of publishers being able to run ads to these other platforms. There could be more discussion about how this would work – surely this concept has already been discussed somewhere.
The team from The New York Times was a runner up with a project called “involve.me“. Their idea was to have a browser extension which annotates websites hoverboxes in key places describing activist causes. I think browser extensions which do Genius-style annotation and more are part of the wave of the future. I have been hearing variations of this concept for years and I continue to like it every time I hear it. There are so many ways to make the base idea of annotation to be fresh and compelling.
The team from Huffington Post was a runner up with a project called “pick 4“. Pick 4 is a tool for allowing the reader of a news article to send the link to any of a suggested four Facebook friends who might be interested in it. The tool is based on a new Facebook functionality which allows developers to call a database of all the interests for a given reader. Suppose that any publisher has a news article. As the reader reads the article, somewhere in the article a Facebook tool is present which checks that reader’s Facebook friends, and chooses four of them who are most likely to also be interested in that article, based on how Facebook’s algorithms match them with keywords in the article. The reader can then manually choose to share the article with those people, if they like.
The team from Buzzfeed was a runner up with a project called Otus. Otus is a tool which watches mostly boring websites for changed text, then alerts subscribes when text changes. One thing that this would detect is warrant canaries, but it might be useful for monitoring any body of text which ought not change.
Our project – WikiReporter.org
See the tool live at WikiReporter.org. See hackathon documentation on the hackathon page, or repeated here:
Wikireporter.org is a wizard for assisting citizen journalists in publishing news articles about events to Wikinews. Examples of events which might be covered include protests, political speeches, academic conferences, and parades. The citizen journalist who uses the tool gets the benefit of an easy way to publish text and images of public events that they attend. Behind the scenes, the use of a form also creates linked data. Since the system publishes to Wikinews, it is suitable to pair with other Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia and Wikidata. Having access to the Wikidata knowledge base permits assisted translation, categorization, and machine reading of data associated with each event documented with this tool.
Technologies used for this project:
The project various Wikimedia projects and their respective Wikimedia volunteer communities for crowdsourced support of every user submission. Wikinews is the news community and publishing platform, Wikimedia Commons reviewers check and host image submissions, Wikipedia provides links to reference information, and Wikidata manages the linked data. See further documentation on English Wikinews at Wikinews:WikiReporter.
At the beginning, Pablo suggested a Wikinews project, and Richard and I agreed. For Consumer Reports, I wanted to have a project that made it easier to bring coverage of protests and academic conferences to Wikipedia. Richard had the idea of covering parades and speeches. I am not sure how we came to discuss events, or how we came upon the idea that all events could be imagined in the same way for the purpose of journalism, but we did. The tool we developed would be a form which asks the user questions about an event. The questions seek basic event details, and as the user answers them, the form generates text which start a Wikinews article. The target demographic for using the tool would be either a new user to Wikinews who wants to write an article, but who has no idea where to start; or alternatively, someone who wants to generate a Wikinews article through their phone and can only do limited typing.
The tool cannot generate good articles, but at least, it establishes a minimal floor of quality in that if someone answers the questions, then basic event details will be presented. Also, there is functionality to add a picture to the article, so for example if someone were at a parade, they could publish the details of the parade, and pictures, and publish something immediately. Other Wikinews requirements still have to be met – sources have to be noted, and there has to be a way of confirming journalists’ notes, and there has to be some journalist insight beyond just presenting facts. A Wikinewsie has already been aggressive in pushing back against the project on the talk page and I would expect that others would be too if they saw it, just because people in small Wikipedia projects are generally so attacked that they remain in a defensive posture.
I think the major innovation of the project is that it creates a channel for the assignment of an authority control to every event. With that in place, then information coming from that event can be cataloged and cited. So photos, videos, documents, transcriptions, presentations, and data about the event can all be matched with the unique name for the event (authority control) and from there, connect to all other information about the event. The Wikidata part of this project does not yet work, but it could be as automatic as everything else. Here is how that plays out in the event examples:
For a conference –
- WikiReporter prompts someone to start an entry with basic conference details, like the point of the conference, where it is held, and the main speakers. A news article is made.
- WikiReporter prompts people to share photographs or videos and puts those into a holding category.
- A Wikidata entry is made for the event.
- The Wikidata entry establishes the authority control, which itself establishes how to categorize all media created for this event.
- Other data could be connected to the Wikidata entry – “papers presented”, for example, so that anyone who finds any photo, news item, or anything about the conference can follow to the source and get as much published information as exists about what was presented at the conference.
In this case, the Wikinews story would be the public face of all this data and the entry point for anyone to find more about this conference.
For a parade the Wikipedia article for the parade would be the entry point for most readers to learn more. Parades are typically more significant for repeatedly happening over years, so most readers would likely want to see the Wikipedia article for historical context. From the Wikipedia article, they might want to connect to get information about parades in any given year, and coverage of each year’s parade would best be in Wikinews.
For a protest the Wikipedia article for the controversial would be the entry point for most readers to learn more. People wanting to learn about a protest are usually more interested in the social issue than in the event itself. From the Wikipedia article, they might want to connect to get information about all of the protests that have ever happened related to the topic, including counter protests or protests in other places. Coverage of individual protest events would be in Wikinews.
For a speech the Wikinews story would be the public face of all this data and the entry point for anyone to find more about this conference. We have been discussing in the Wikimedia community about the copyright of speeches. Scripted talks are copyrighted, of course, but unscripted talks have been imagined to be not copyrighted. It is a troublesome situation – Wikisource editors would like to archive the text of every speech given in every language. For political speeches especially, it would be nice to have the right to publish what politicians say. Even in the United States this is legally uncertain. Some time ago some of us Wikipedians talked with PBS when they hosted the 2016 Democratic Presidential Debate. Works by employees of the US Federal Government are in the public domain when they produce them as part of their work. Work by government officials not representing the central government is not in the public domain, so without a copyright release, Wikimedia projects cannot host them.
There is more to consider and discuss!