2019/Grants/Glassbox - A WordPress plugin for opening the news

Title:

Glassbox - A WordPress plugin for opening the news

Name:

José Flores

Wikimedia username:

padaguan

E-mail address:

pepe.flsgmail.com

Resume:

Geographical impact:

Global

Type of project:

Technology

What is your idea?

In 2017, we developed a NewsDiffs fork (http://newsdiff.devlabmexico.org/browse/) for monitoring three of the largest online newspapers in Mexico (El Sol de Mexico, El Universal, Excelsior). We have been looking for stealth editions since January 2018 and we detected different practices that affect reliability in contents (adding/editing/removing text, adding/editing sources). Since audiences go unnoticed about these changes, we believe that this tool could improve accountability if implemented in a larger scale.

Our idea is to develop Glassbox, a Wordpress plugin that could be installed in any digital media, in order to provide a View History function on the published news. With this plugin, people would be able to see how content has been modified, even subscribing (via RSS) to a specific note or section. Ideally, this plug-in would be integrated in a larger toolbox for WordPress editors.

Why is it important?

Misinformation is a very complex phenomenon. Media’s credibility has lessened because of questionable practices like stealth editions. This plug-in would help media outlets to be accountable to their audiences. We believe that using the Glassbox plug-in could be seen as a commitment to open the newsrooms to public scrutiny, by using something that could be easily installed by everyone.

Besides, misinformation is an alarming situation in Latin America, where media companies are not used to follow nor enforce rigorous editorial policies. By using technology to open the process of news publishing, we can also improve it. Newsmaking should be a public discussion, in order to strengthen reliability and credibility.

Is your project already in progress?

How is it relevant to credibility and Wikipedia? (max 500 words)

The application of this tool is inspired by Wikipedia's View History functionality. In Latin America, editorial guidelines are lax, even in large, well-established media. Newsrooms edit content without notifying their audiences about the changes, and some of these editions severely modify the framing of the news. While some editions may be easily discarded as corrections, others should be disclosed to the public. Allowing the people to oversee these changes may also help to crowdsource the fight against misinformation, as Wikipedia’s collective intelligence have shown.

One of the biggest lessons from Wikipedia is that knowledge is a social construction. News are susceptible to bias, manipulation, and private interests. There’s nothing inherently wrong with editing – as a matter of fact, is one of the advantages of digital journalism. But it is different to update a text than changing a source, or adding multimedia content to offer context than removing information. Credibility and openness are intimately related, and newsrooms can learn from Wikipedia’s best practices.

What is the ultimate impact of this project?

Could it scale?

Yes. Since the goal is to create a Wordpress plug-in, the tool would be available for practically 20% of all self-hosted websites in the world. The plug-in could also be integrated with other tools and potentially be used with other CMS platforms.

Why are you the people to do it?

Three main reasons: 1) I have the support of the organization where I work: R3D, a Mexican NGO focused on digital rights; that means I could spend some of my time at work in this project; 2) I have a deep understanding about media practices, since I worked for 5-6 years in native digital media, have a master's degree in Digital Media and also worked on the qualitative analysis of the previous results of the monitoring; 3) my colleague Noe Dominguez, who made the code for our NewsDiffs fork, is an amazing developer; he has an MSc in Computer Science, experience with civic tech and crowdsourcing. We are the team to make this possible.

What is the impact of your idea on diversity and inclusiveness of the Wikimedia movement?

What are the challenges associated with this project and how you will overcome them?

How much money are you requesting?

12,500 USD

Hosting: 0.5k

Research: 3k

Data Analysis, reports and data visualizations: 2k

Development: 7k

How will you spend the money?

Request For Comments (rfc): using newsdiffs for information accountability.

Technical community: discuss the technical issues with the Wordpress community for the development of the tool.

Newsrooms coalition: Discuss with selected newsrooms about the creation of the tool and get meaningful feedback.

Development of the Wordpress plugin to be included in Newspack.

Data analysis and processing of newsdiffs.

Digital Journalism publication writing.

How long will your project take?

10-12 months

Have you worked on projects for previous grants before?