Another day in 2017 another story about fake news except this time the news is about a news site that wants to kill off fake news completely.

The news sites with this lofty aspiration is Wikitribune, a new platform developed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

“The news is broken, but we’ve figured out how to fix it,” claims Wales in a video announcing the new platform.

That fix it seems is transparency. As Wikitribune says, facts can be presented with bias and this new platform will remove that bias and present nothing but the facts. Readers will also be able to see the sources of these facts.

Wikitribune Campaign from impossible on Vimeo.

Fixing the news also involves something a bit more questionable, community involvement. “Wikitribune is a news site with a new model for the news. It takes professional standards-based journalism and incorporates the radical idea from the world of wiki that a group of volunteers can and will reliably protect the integrity of information,” Wales says.

That’s an awful lot of trust being placed in a community that can and has on several occasions edited Wikipedia for a quick laugh.

Unlike most news sites which rely on advertising for funding, Wikitribune will be funded by donations. At time of writing the website already had close to 5 000 supporters.

There will also be no paywall once the site has acquired 10 journalists from around the world to fill it up with content. Should the site be unable to hire 10 journos supporters will be refunded.

The big question then is can 10 journalists supported by a community of editors solve the problem of fake news? We are somewhat skeptical but we’ll put our cynicism on the back burner for a while to see how Wikitribune shapes up.