taken east and go to the remaining rebel stronghold near the capital damascus the last opposition fighters have left the city of duma leaders of arab league nations are taking part in the annual summit in saudi arabia president bashar assad is not attending the meeting following series suspension from the group in twenty eleven the meeting is likely to focus on the conflicts in syria and yemen as well as the status of jerusalem leaders at the summit of the americas in peru are calling on venezuela to hold a free and fair presidential election next month they say the votes will be illegitimate if the country doesn't restore democratic standards voting has begun in montenegro as presidential election prime minister and former president of jakarta virtue is the favorite to win he's never lost an election in these ruling democratic party of socialism dominated politics more than twenty five years his main opponent has accused him of dictatorship and wanting closer ties with russia

thousands of people have attended the funeral of south african anti apartheid activists then the medic is there monday are known by many as the mother of the nation she died nearly two weeks ago at the age of eighty one the first rank of family to be repacholi aged from bangladesh's arrived in may in ma's rakhine states the family of five has been given identification documents but not citizenship the uni is warning the community still faces discrimination and persecution. is up. al jazeera is a very important force of information for many people around the world when all the cameras have gone i'm still here to go into areas that nobody else is going talk to people that nobody else is talking to and bringing that story to the forefront. in the world is all that will move the ability.

we kapadia according to wikipedia is a multilingual web based free content encyclopedia project supported by the wikimedia foundation and based on a model of openly editable contents the project launched in january two thousand and one but with its current reach of one point four billion individual devices accessing some forty six million articles in three hundred languages every month we could be in today's digital age is already a powerful empire one of the masterminds behind this digital source of knowledge is jimmy wales. today he is working on a new project we contribute in a form of journalism he hopes will be a counterweight to both superficial information and take news. can this new count form replace traditional journalism as we know it and with digital currencies and

killer robots being part of today's world what should humans expect from to call the g into q church jimmy wales talks to al-jazeera. to me with thank you for talking to al jazeera you've already been the mosque the money behind one digital revolution wiki pedia of course the transform the way that we seek and accumulate knowledge and information you're now doing something potentially equally true groundbreaking with the news business we can attribute. rebelution eyes in the way that we receive and process news as we go going good we about a year ago we did a crowdfunding campaign to get initial resources to start the project and we started publishing stories for the first time in late october twenty seventh again . and now we're cranking along small team of journalists and tech

stuff and we're basically working on the software making it easier for people to participate and to really try to build a whole new. framework really for how journalists and community members can work together was it fake news specific lee that triggered this idea in the way it was there was sort of particular moment when something happened you said this is noir you know there really was i've been thinking about the idea for quite a long time actually when we when we started working on the project i realized i had reserved the domain name five years ago so i've been thinking about it for that long but what really provoked me was you know the sense during the last u.s. election all the talk about fake news about post post truth world and those kinds of things and i remember you know i was in davos and somebody convinced me they said look you've got to give the president one hundred days it's an american tradition one hundred days to see what he does and i thought all right you

know let's just see we've just said the election he was just being sworn into office and it was the very next day when kellyanne conway said something about alternative facts about this dispute about how many people regular inauguration and i was just like yeah you know what hundred days is up like this is not acceptable behavior like facts do matter and in particular something like that is just a very simple statement that to lie about it when there is photographic evidence and so on is just outraged. and so anyway for me. it wasn't just that but that was kind of the last straw that was the thing that made me say you know what i'm going to do this now it's not a brand new concept is it fake news it's been around a long time or perhaps in the past in the realms of sort of conspiracy theory the moon landing j.f.k. all that i believe has now really made its way into the mainstream narrative how dangerous do you feel fake news is well i think it's it is quite dangerous and i

think we can the term fake news has so many different possible meanings from i wanted to the spectrum stories about teenagers creating fake websites to get some quick ad money is a real thing it's a real problem all the way to donald trump uses the term to mean news he doesn't like or doesn't agree with but i think we really step back and say ok well let's avoid that term for a moment and look at a lot of the problems facing journalism as a profession the news industry it's a serious problem and it's a it's a problem not only the sort of national sort of our understanding of the world globally but really at the local level the decline of local newspapers has been really devastating and it's something that i think everybody should be concerned about and we should all be thinking about how do we fix this so tell us more about how we keep tribune actually works it's a similar sort of crowd sourced model to we keep either isn't it the wisdom of the

crowds bearing upon the news model give us a better sense of how it actually we're sure yes so the idea of the tribune is to say let's let's replicate and let's build a healthy strong community much like the community creates wikipedia so you it's not wide open to everyone we want people who are thoughtful and kind and interested in contributing in a positive way and i want that community to work side by side with the paid professional journalists as equals and so that's. really unusual the idea of saying let's actually empower that community they can make decisions they can actually do things by the same time they're going to be backed up by professional journalists who can do things like you know drop everything to pursue a story for four days things that citizen journalists find harder to do and basically we're a power project right now really exploring a lot of different ideas to think about how can the community best contribute how do they want to contribute what are the things that only the professional

journalists can do and you know how can we think about that. and it's fun you know where we're cranking away every day so it's not just about empowering citizen journalism it is also about recognizing that there is a place and a value for professional journalists that sort of wisdom as well absolutely absolutely i mean the funny thing is what people can't do from home and what journalists think may not always map together a lot of journalists seem to think they're the only ones who can understand the world and explain it to people that's not true at all but they may be you know the people who can get access the people who can. partly understand the world and explain it all but also things like interview skills you know there's a lot of very specific skills or all journalism that not everyone will have even though there are a lot of people out there who can do all kinds of interesting research and things like that so any way i see i see real opportunities in that collaboration can you give us an example of. i mean a sort of story

a type of event in which we keep tribune comes into its own in which we contributing works and therefore in practice how it works so trump you know they did the big tax cut corporate tax rates were slashed in the us a really important story but on the day of. most of the news about it was very superficial very you know not very insightful as a lot of often tends to be yeah and also quite opinionated you know but opinion without a lot of analysis i just wanted to know what is actually in this law right i'm an american living in london so my taxes are incredibly complicated what how is that going to impact me and what is actually in there that was hard to find now i just saw a cover of a newspaper today has done looks like a fantastic piece of explaining what it's all about but that's the kind of thing that you can see how a community. can do a very good job of actually getting people who are you know real experts in the field to come in and help do you foresee a moment in time when we could tribune becomes you know rather like wikipedia the

first stop perhaps a one stop resource for people who are interested in the news in what's happening today what it means and they just go into a website and they'll get everything they need without any further the need to track traditional media or any other source i don't know sounds very difficult simply because. you know i think that the traditional media and the traditional methods of doing things do work incredibly well for certain types of things i think will our strength will be more along the slow news the more reflective news and so i do think we can become a bit of a place where people say all right everybody is always going on and on about about bricks. the truth is for this aspect of rex and i don't really understand it so i'm going to go to the tribune and read their explainer let's talk about the decline of local news that's an issue you are interested in because it's not just here about reaching for objective truths in big. changing events it's also about looking into

small corners of the world where local journalists used to do the digging into anymore because the model has fallen apart the avatars go on and you can perhaps once again fill that gap yes so i'm really interested in the problem of local journalism the number of journalists left to keep an eye on the p.p. bank so to speak right to keep an eye on what's going on is so small now that we run a real risk of seeing a lot of local corruption a lot of a lot of bad things happen when nobody is paying attention so i think this is a fundamental problem that we need to really focus a lot of attention on trying to solve and my thinking here and we're not yet doing local it with the tribune it's something we want to tris as we can is that around local journalism that's where this community model can really come into play that there are people locally people who are very passionate about their local communities if we can get the local fans of the local high school football league.

if they can all work together to report what's happening in that and then we don't have to pay people to do that then hey journalist we can hire ok we'll put them to work checking out you know the mayor's bank account not sure if we can do it or not but i'm going to try i think it's really i think it's really interesting and worth a stab anyway. now you've got your critics you look knowledge that people who say that you're reinventing the wheel people who say that traditional media whilst embattled is not in fact broken as you have said that it is that there is still a very healthy stream of fact based reporting that holds trumps free to the fire every day that is brought down jacob zuma in south africa and his cronies that exposes injustices in places like me and my have you lost faith in the traditional media not have and i've actually been very pleased to see a few of the trends in recent times. you know one of the biggest and most important

trends i've seen is that the new york times their digital subscriptions have skyrocketed from something like a million to well over two million that's really important and that's a signal that the public does still care about real journalism and you know i want to see a lot more of that and you know it's it is amazing how many of the. news services out there are doing real journalism even in the face of a business model that is sending them all the signals in the world of like you know you just paid a senior reporter for three weeks to do this story you were made just as much money by hiring some millennial who got a good sense of humor writing some viral content and there you know in the face of that they're still saying no we're going to do serious journalism we have to figure out the business model to make that happen and i think that's fantastic. but i think most people in the industry would agree wow it's been embattled and certainly for aspects of it it's been effectively destroyed and i think that's something that

does bother people i would talk to you about. the ability of wiki tribune to censor of ensure its accuracy which of course is fundamentally in combat or refuting fake news claims and. the one question i would have is as a sort of open source of crowd source online community based project isn't. infinitely open to subversion to the hijacking of the likes of the troll communities and so on who just jump on and do what they've done on facebook and on twitter yes so you really way they can't as easily subvert traditional media yeah i mean i think you really have to be very focused on that as a potential problem but you can't let that stand in the way of trying to empower genuinely good people to participate and do things of quality so we know it would be p.d. of course people get banned from wikipedia every single day for coming on and trolling and doing something but the but the result is they do get bad every single

day and you can't say that necessarily of some of the platforms where they tolerate incredibly bad behavior because they consider themselves to be really open platforms whereas wiki pedia has always said this is an open free speech zone this is a project to build an encyclopedia so some way for us i mean we have to have very strong community rules we have to say to people certain behaviors are absolutely not welcome here if you want to. you know go and sort of troll and rant there's the whole internet open t.v. there's lots of places we're not stopping you from doing that but don't do it here we've actually been very happy so far with the you know we have every story this post that has a talk page so you can go and comment but we've really encouraged people with a lot of messaging in our existing core community really understands this this isn't like other news sites where the point is just discuss the news give your opinion about what trump did today or whatever it's always supposed to be about how can we improve this article what can we do to make this better what should the next

article be what is the one of the questions left unanswered what are the things we need to be thinking about working on and that's actually been very successful people have been very good about saying ok yeah that's what we're going to talk about here and i think that's really important that we keep that kind of an attitude as we grow because otherwise if you just say yeah it's radical free speech on and one of the things that a lot of new sites do. a few years back and i think most of them of pulled back because they realized it was a mistake as they really prioritized as a metric the number of comments they had that was a measure of reader engagement or people commenting on what we're writing turns out office will result rebel yeah written by robots or it's just the worst people in humanity screaming at each other screaming the drum was a really adding value you know everybody's heard the expression stop read the comments because you read the news story of the bottom in italy who are these idiots down here oh ok so now new sites are understanding that that's not actually like prioritising number of comments is can be very unhealthy because they're not

helpful people really well i want to ask you the same sort of question about we keep pedia about that self correction of the crowds i mean we keep eating what is the fifth most visited website in the world it's known to just about everybody who has access to the internet yes influences politicians journalists policymakers the world. who guards the accuracy we keep pedia i mean who's accountable for that so what's interesting about wikipedia is is you really have to understand the community as a very healthy community a strong community of people who are very passionate about getting it right. who supervise everything who become admins and block people who are trolling and vandalizing but it's really a it's a it's about chewing on the ideas it's about open continuous dialogue how do we improve how do we get better what have we gotten wrong who screwed up what how do we fix it and all that so it's

a big noisy process obviously imperfect everybody's seen a new story about a mistake and we could p.d.f. or something like this but it really is about having a community of people who care that's a very human values oriented sort of thing it's not a magical software solution. and it's i don't think it's fragile we've been going for quite a long time but i. i do think it requires a certain amount of nurturing certain amount of saying reminding ourselves always hey we're here for a real purpose. not sort of enable trolling and nonsense really how involved are you still don't today we could be i'm pretty involved i mean i acted in the community i do a lot of public speaking that takes up a lot of my time the past year or so i've been really focused on with each of you and so obvious i'm spending more time on that i'm on the board of the wikipedia foundation which is the charity that i set up that would be the so it'll keep me very busy you've got to obviously have i mean a sort of deep in a faith in the idea of the wisdom of crowds in the goodness of people you said you

were to turn to mist i mean to some people that might strike them as naive given given how easily corruptible the internet has become the sort of dark and dark spaces and all the noticed is involved i mean how do you maintain that sense of yeah well i mean i think maybe it is a bit naive but i hope not insanely so i mean he has proven largely that there are a lot of nice people out there and they just want to help out and do something useful and i think the the we can't be silly and ignore potential problems you have to sort of think about them and realistically defend against attacks and things like that but the existence of you know dark places on the internet doesn't disprove the existence of places of light and joy so it's sort of like you know we're sitting here in london somewhere in london right now

something really horrible is happening with bad people who are doing something and there's also wonderful homes and families and loving environments and so forth and that's all that mess is the human condition and what we have to think about is how do we get the better side of things how do we make sure that stays empowered and that that's important and that these problems remain. anomalies and also that we try to address them and try to help the people who are in need in those disaster situations whatever that may be that's a bit naive maybe but i don't know what else we can do what scares you about the internet about its potential and where it's going so one of the things that i worry a lot about is the rise of censorship. the rise of the ability of countries to block political information they don't like i think that is troubling and it's a multifaceted problem it's moving beyond simply

a basic sort of you know block the website you don't agree with into troll armies and things like that to silence opposition by flooding zones with with nonsense and so on that's that's troublesome it's something i think we need to think a lot about an obviously everybody is taking a lot of out of these days a lot of focus on that sort of thing but so that's one thing what inspires you about it what inspires me about the internet in the internet community is just the sheer number of perfectly nice people there are out there it's easy to forget sometimes that people are really lovely i always give an example that has nothing to do with my work. there's on reddit which is a place that has very dark alleys and dark places but also there's the personal finance sub reddit where a typical post is someone who's nineteen says oh dear my alcoholic father just passed away and i found out he had taken out credit cards in my name and i have thirty thousand dollars in debt i don't know what to do i'm

a young person and then people like they weigh in with like a really good advice and they say oh you didn't say what state you're in but in california you call this office and here's how you deal with it here's the notification wow like these are just nice people helping out someone on the internet i mean that's the spirit that reminds me of the early like happy days of the internet and so that's that's inspirational to me. do you believe in killer robots. i've always joked that you know when the killer robots come you have me to think for their fine knowledge of elizabeth and poetry because the killer robots will read wiki pedia. but yeah no i mean i think we i mean speaking incredibly literally i do think that we're going to see the rise of automated killing robots machines in warfare and i think that's going to happen sooner rather than later i know there's been some discussion maybe we should be banned before they get started under the geneva convention type of situation but i

think that the cost of building such things continues to decline and there isn't nothing to be done about that that's just part of technological progress and that there will be something like this and if maybe it's not sanctioned by the major important countries that. it's like a black mirror but i think that's coming so actual killer robots as people have broader fear about the future of technology and what does it mean for humankind there i do remain very optimistic and i think we really got an amazing futureheads doing block training is going to change the world so blah chain i'm cautiously skeptical of black shame simply because there's so much hype right now there's so much noise so much nonsense being peddled that's clearly nonsense at the same time i have to say when i first learned about blood chain and really studied it enough

to really get the concept it's genius it's a genius idea. what applications it may have i think are still mostly to be determined that clearly there's the application of the currency's what application to cryptocurrency that's still largely open question. there's all kinds of interesting things out there but it's sort of there's so much noise and so. much nonsense it's really hard to get things that actually i feel like are really meaningful and going to have a big oh you a bit corn invest i'm not a bit going to have us drive i people have given big point and if the area to support we could be in and. because it's got done nothing but go straight up we made some money off of that before i had time to sell it it went up but we thought about it some sometimes the people have donated because they said i hope you'll keep it in big coin and obviously you have to pay a journalist and they can't really accept bitcoin to pay the rent or whatever but

maybe only sell it when you have to but we sort of thought no actually our our objective is to be neutral in our reporting and if we had a big pile of bitcoin we might become boosters of bitcoin and that's not really serving even the people who are donating bitcoin what they want is quality journalism about that point so i think we'll just continue to sell. as as it comes and i don't know to wrap up with the pedia has sites in three hundred languages forty six million articles accessed by one point four billion individual devices every month. how often do you sit back as i imagine you must and reflect on the enormity of this thing that you created back in what must have seemed like the dark days of the digital world in two thousand and one yeah i mean fairly often i mean occasionally something will happen and that reminds me of how

incredibly global our impact is so one of the things i'm very interested in on a personal level is education in the developing world and thinking about what how can technology help in that area and when i meet students a while back i met some students in a slum like a terrible area in the dominican republic and they had a computer center that had just been built and they all had mobile devices even though it was a very poor area and they all knew wiki pedia of course and i thought wow because they told me five years prior to this there was no electricity in the area and you know that's remarkable to think about that that people who formally would have almost no access to information have the world's knowledge in their pocket that's an amazing thing in its. school jimmy wales once again thank you for talking to us .

for nearly half a century. a controversial political figure in the cold in the middle east and one who was never far from crisis at home or abroad. in a two part series al-jazeera world tells the story of king hussein of jordan. episode one so far on al-jazeera. with bureaus spanning six continents across the globe. al-jazeera has correspondents live in green the stories they tell. us

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