jimmy wales thanks for joining me on front you're about to launch a project called wiki tribune with the bold objective to quote fix the news to combat the rise of fake news facebook has just announced they're actually in this thing we could pedia with you founded to help combat fake news so how big a problem do you think this really is is fake news in your view the front to truth and democracy that some seem to think it is. yes i do i think it's a it's a fairly serious problem and it's a broader problem than just what i would call pure fake news i.e. these websites that have popped up that offer completely counterfeit stories and completely made up nonsense there's also the broader problem of a rise of relatively low quality media which is competing with more traditional more respectable media in a really aggressive way for clicks and ad revenue and so forth which is really putting a lot more pressure on journalism than it has already experience which has been quite a lot of us like and just on the counterfeit stories tech giants like facebook and google really seem to be struggling

their narrative or their ideology they just dismiss it as fake and move on somewhere else how is wiki tribune going to solve that problem. well i mean i think human nature is human nature and nothing is really changed about it certainly nothing is changed by human nature in the last two years i mean human nature doesn't move that quickly and so we've always had the problem of people wanting to confirm their own biases but i also find that there's a very deep undercurrent of people who say actually i want to be a challenge i want to hear something that i disagree with but that is high quality that's actually interesting to a lot of people and the evidence for this in my view is that wiki pedia is more popular than any of the top newspapers of the world combined that people do have a hunger for just very basic very straight presented facts or maybe a little bit tired of coming to read a news story and getting something that's fifty percent an opinion piece and fifty percent a news story i think people really do say actually i want facts i want something serious but there is growing feeling this

jimmy wales thanks for joining me from you're about to launch a project called wiki tribune with the bold objective to quote fix the news to combat the rise of fake news facebook has just announced they're actually in this thing we could pedia with you founded to help combat fake news so how big a problem do you think this really is is fake news in your view the threat to truth and democracy that some seem to think it is. yes i do i think it's a it's a fairly serious problem and it's a broader problem than just what i would call pure fake news i.e. these websites that have popped up that offer completely counterfeit stories and completely made up nonsense there's also the broader problem of a variety of relatively low quality media which is competing with the more traditional more respectable media in a really aggressive way for clicks and ad revenue and so forth which is really putting a lot more pressure on journalism than it has already experience which has been quite a lot of us like and just on the counterfeit stories tech giants like facebook and google really seem to be strugg

interesting and something new i just want to understand how this new crowd funded news website wiki tribune would work if say ten thousand people signed up to become supporters of it and stop pushing for a particular maybe random type of story will you then cover the story no matter how random it is and if so how do you then protect yourself from special interests political parties foreign governments from taking advantage of your model to use your website to push their agendas. well this is the other element that you really do need to have balance so you need to have a strong editorial vision that is about doing quality work you know in a very thoughtful way you need to have a really robust community i mean it would be very difficult for somebody with a fake grassroots campaign to come and have any impact whatsoever with the pedia because we have a large community who are very dedicated to their more dedicated to wikipedia than they are to whatever somebody is trying to push on them but it's not automatic i mean it is about culture it is about values i don't think it's something to take li