Infobitt founder/CEO here. We want to solve this problem by creating a separate homepage for each nationality, or perhaps simply by filtering the news in a certain clever way that I won't bother to describe. The great thing about a big online community coming together to build Infobitt will be that we can indeed compare different sources. Perhaps your impressions of U.S. news is correct. Perhaps when stacked up directly with other reporting, you'll find it's not as bad as you think. We'll be able to tell much more easily because facts from different sources will be rubbing shoulders within the same bitts (stories = collections of facts).

Infobitt founder/CEO here. Hey, I love Google News. But what they don't do is summarize the stories, nor do they make a credible effort of organizing the news in a way that makes it possible to get caught up with the news quickly and efficiently. Suppose you want to really learn about a story that is being covered by many different news sources. Google News provides the awesome service of letting you find all the coverage quickly. But what they don't do is make it any easier to extract original reporting from among the facts contained in those articles. You can read one article, and that will get your fingers on one part of the elephant...but if you want to handle the whole elephant, you'll have to wade through all the other articles as well. A community of newshounds could do that for you, summarizing all the unique facts in a nonredundant way, putting them in order of importance. That's what we're trying to do.

Hi, I'm the Infobitt founder/CEO. No, it's not the same thing at all. Wikinews doesn't address itself to the problem of making sense of the news in the face of facts being scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, etc. Traditional citizen journalism just gives people a platform to write articles and pretend to be journalists. We're not doing that. We're inviting people to find, rank, summarize both individual facts and stories (which we call bitts, which are made up of facts). Our mission isn't to add to the cacophany of the news, but to organize it.

sorry, I didn't mean to repeat "The Chair of the UK's Wikipedia charity is not permitted to edit Wikipedia" in the summary. Please remove it!

I'm not sure why I'm replying to this, out of all the daft things that have come from this thread--maybe because I'm annoyed when people get history wrong. "Teancum," whoever you are, you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about. I am the guy who started Wikipedia. There is lots of documentation of this on larrysanger.org. I did NOT think that one had to have a Ph.D. to write articles for Wikipedia. I'm the guy who tried to get everyone working together--even kids. Others have said this about me, but they weren't there, or if they were, they're lying. I am not, in fact, a "deletionist." I am an inclusionist. I think people should be able to write about whatever their heart desires, as long as there is a chance of there being a full complement of articles of that type. If people want to have articles about every Star Trek episode, go for it, as long as you can cover all of them. Finally, even if there is "bad blood" between me and the current Wikipedia community--not the original one, mind you--that hardly means "there are many problems with what he says," unless you are a cultist who believes that "the Wikipedia community" is inerrant. Otherwise, thanks for your support.

Hi all, author of TFA here. I have a bunch of replies, which address many of the things said here on Slashdot, on my blog.

I've posted quite a few times here on Slashdot, and I have to say, this is the most civilized discussion I have seen, well, ever in this forum. I have to think that I've hit a nerve, and people are actually not just doing their usual posturing, but actually caring about the question and trying to come to grips with it. There may be hope for geeks yet.

So, you went to an undemanding college that grants degrees easily. And that logically implies that college, in general, is a waste of time?

So, you're saying you disagree with them. Right? Just checking.

I don't see a case of "cool to be stupid," either. Geek anti-intellectualism is not like jock anti-intellectualism. As TFA says...well, I'll just let you read it.

Well, there's more to the post than the "college is a waste of time" thing. Scan down for the points (numbered 1-5) that I'm calling anti-intellectual. "College is a waste of time" is one only of them. And besides, if you'll look at Dale Stephens' CNN article, you'll see plenty of anti-intellectual notes.