Fifteen months after launch, traffic and donations at WikiTribune are low, its editor Peter Bale has left, and the majority of stories are written by staff -- Nieman Lab

Excerpt from a WikiTribute profile:

"This new, “raw” design was rolled out at the end of May. Before the redesign, Wales wrote to the site’s email list, WikiTribune had started to feel complex and intimidating despite being “beautiful.”

“We didn’t really have genuine community control, and we didn’t get very much work done,” he wrote. The relaunch is not just in style, but in concept. “The push is to turn over genuine control to the community, to let people work live without a net. It’s about trusting you, and it’s about welcoming you.” A new front-end editor was rolled out this week, making it easier for anybody to hop in and start editing.

“I realized that I built Nupedia again — too top-down, too restrained, not trusting enough,” Wales told me in a Slack DM last month. (Nupedia was the predecessor of Wikipedia, but it required a seven-step, editor-driven approval process for any updates to any of its content; in its three years of operations, only 25 fully approved articles were actually published.) “I should have known better, but hey, at least this time it only took me a year to realize it — last time it took two.”"

Fifteen months after launch, traffic and donations at WikiTribune are low, its editor Peter Bale has left, and the majority of stories are written by staff -- Nieman Lab