Glassbox Project¶
Our project consists in a protocol for the communication on how the news change between media outlets and its audience. We want to let the audience know how the news change and evolve.
The protocol has been implemented in a Wordpress Plugin to publish Newsdiffs in standard endpoints. In this way users can know how posts have evolved through a proactive transparency approach adopted by the site.
How is it relevant?¶
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 has shown.
One of the biggest lessons from Wikipedia is that knowledge is a social construction. News are too: they 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.
Contents:
Contributing¶
Data schema¶
History¶
Wordpress plugin¶
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 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. News making should be a public discussion, in order to strengthen reliability and credibility.
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. Also we would like to draft a protocol RFC to publish newsdiffs to subscribed peers. The plug-in could also be integrated with other tools and potentially implemented other CMS platforms by following the standard.
Design¶
The plugin is designed to leverage the use of Wordpress revisions. The plugin adds the capability to expose the revisions of post_types when revisions are enabled.
We have enabled four different endpoints:
{{site}}/wp-json/wp/v2/glassbox - Enables to see the revisions of posts edited in the last 72 hours.
{{site}}/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/{{post_id}}/glassbox - Enables to see all the stored revisions of a given post.
{{site}}/glassbox - Enables to see the revisions of posts edited in the last 72 hours in Json format.
{{site}}/PERMALINK/glassbox - Enables REDIRECT TO see all the stored revisions of a given post into the wp-json API.
Compatibility¶
Wordpress 4.7 > and up.
Installation¶
Download the (plugin zip)[https://github.com/GlassboxNews/wordpress-plugin/releases/tag/v0.1.0-beta.1].
Install the zip as a plugin by uploading the file.
Activate the plugin.
(Optional) You should enable the use of wordpress Json API if disabled.
Demo¶
Acknowledgements¶
@sterndata - Member of the Wordpress community
@Clorith - Member of the Wordpress community