A Wikipedia For The News
December 4, 2014
The news community is a very disorganized place with outlets competing for your attention and clicks. A different perspective on stories also creates chaos when trying to find accurate information. While news aggregators can sift through the bulk of the junk news, they still manage to squeeze through way through algorithms. The news seems to be increasing and disorganization is mounting.
Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, decided enough was enough with the news. He is starting Infobitt, a new endeavor similar to Wikipedia, except it revolves around the news. Sanger explains his goal in a short essay: “How We Can Organize The News.” He wants to catalog every news article generated for the Web, summarize it, and store it on Infobitt:
“Here’s the Infobitt model. We grab different facts from different news sources, summarize them in sentences which link back to those sources. We each drag-and-drop the facts into our preferred order, and the system calculates the sense of the community. The result is a bitt.
That’s not all. There’s a stream of new bitts arriving in the system. We put bitts in order of importance by drag-and-drop as well. We’ve made a new way to collaborate on collecting the news.”
Sanger points out that people thought Wikipedia was crazy. Now it is one of the main information sources in the world. The goal is that 100,000 people will upload a one sentence description with a URL. It will work, it will just take a long time.
Whitney Grace, December 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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