Wales said that the WikiTribune would have "no other agenda than this: the ultimate arbiter of the truth is the facts of reality". Which is amusing coming from the bloke who created an encyclopaedia which insists that Fudzilla did not exist, because his editors have agendas.

As you might expect when a pilot version of WikiTribune went live this week it was pretty clear it is doing all the things it said it wouldn’t. Journalists will need to provide the source of a fact or provide full transcripts and recordings of interviews. WikiTribune's homepage is mostly news aggregation all sourced to fairly mainstream news outlets, including some that are on Wikipedia's preferred sources list such as CNN and Reuters. How on earth can it say that it is better than traditional news sources when it is nearly entirely based on those sources?

To make matters worse it has an "Editor's choice" module, which highlights some stories over others and favours some slants over others.

The approach that it is taking will pretty quickly end up printing the same Fake News that all the others do by accident. Meanwhile real news will be spiked by those wackypedia “editors” keen to show how “powerful” they are.

The site's first "taster" article published in mid-September 2017 "prompted such derision from supporters that some cancelled their monthly donations in protest"; readers reportedly complained that the article "was littered with factual errors and incomprehensible sentences" and seemed to have a pronounced liberal bias and they wanted the usual stuff they got from quality sources like Fox.