NPR – “At any given moment, volunteers and paid workers are writing fictional narratives that they present online as news stories, and some of those will get picked up and shared — perhaps thousands of times — on social media. Hoaxes are presented as fact, conspiracy theories are offered as truth, and some of them may even end up on Wikipedia, one of the most-visited sites online. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the crowdsourced encyclopedia, has been thinking about how to tackle the problem of “fake news.” On Thursday, he delivered a keynote address on “the future role for evidence-based journalism” at the Westminster Media Forum, an international conference organized by the British Parliament. In the face of false information, Wales still believes that the more open and connected people are online, the better things will be for everyone.

In this era, where we’ve seen the rise of these fake news websites and so forth, Wikipedia has had almost no problems with this at all,” Wales says. “Simply because our community is quite — you know, it’s their hobby to debate about the quality of sources, and it’s very difficult to fool the Wikipedia community with this.”