Blockshow Europe 2018 : Jimmy Whales against fake news

One of the highlights of Blockshow Europe 2018 held in Berlin as of celebrity star power was the keynote of Jimmy Whales co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.

In his speech he presented his entrepreneurial journey and his latest project.

He started off by saying that crypto space is in a hype bubble, not every industry is suited for a Blockchain implementation, but it needs to deliver on its promises for usable applications.

And yet some ideas may be brilliant but ahead of their times cause either the people are not ready or the technology isn’t there. And he brought the example of his business idea of online delivery of food which miserably failed at 1996. Now we all know and use these apps.

Then he had another brilliant idea. A free peer-reviewed encyclopedia. The peer-reviewed part cost him a quarter of a million dollars, but at least he has 12 great articles to read them at his bed.

He pivoted this encyclopedia idea and let anybody edit the entries and had no monetization plan. Somehow this worked and today we have Wikipedia. Here I have to say that Wikipedia although it appears in the top search results sometimes is not that accurate.

Then he went on to present his latest project WikiTribune which is a news website in which journalists with established background in the profession research, syndicate and report on widely publicized news stories alongside volunteers who curate articles by proofreading, fact-checking, suggesting possible changes, and adding sources from other, usually long established outlets.

He said that ad only business model is destructive for journalist industry. Now that ad money are shared with other channels ( Facebook , Google etc ), are getting less and less and this led to clickbait , fake news and somewhat fake news. And he showed the example of this article in which the writer took a random picture and adjusted his story to it. Yes, in Beijing there is a lot of pollution, but people don’t watch sunrises to TVs, the TV in question was for demonstration.

That’s why he created WikiTribune to focus on facts and contributors will have to prove their stories. The business model is crowdfunding and it is a completely new company without any relation to WikiPedia ( except of course the reference in the name ).

And closing his speech, he stressed the need for neutral journalism in crypto space.

That was the session of Jimmy Whales. Not the most startling keynote, but not boring either. I wish him best of luck with his new project, because indeed we need more trusted sources of news.

Be healthy , Smile and Steem !