Great points. I'm glad to see this WikiTribune and will try to support it, but it's producing more leaves when what we actually need is an easy way to navigate the branches. Ialready have access to a variety of news sources and though I like the collaborative approach on display here what's really missing are better semantic tools for parsing existing news.
Increasingly, I feel the web annotations standard might point a way forward because it offers people a way to share information about content that's not under control of the publisher. Of course, this will generate a flood of low-quality garbage of the sort found on conspiracy sites, but it also allows for the creation of federated graphs that point back to primary sources, and my bet is that structural integrity will eventually count for more than startle value.
Increasingly, I feel the web annotations standard might point a way forward because it offers people a way to share information about content that's not under control of the publisher. Of course, this will generate a flood of low-quality garbage of the sort found on conspiracy sites, but it also allows for the creation of federated graphs that point back to primary sources, and my bet is that structural integrity will eventually count for more than startle value.