We’ve created a very systematic approach to journalism, which suits a young team, where you need — not exactly an imposed style, but a bit of a style guide or stylistic approach can allow young, very inexperienced journalists to have a framework in which to write. It’s not dissimilar, though I wouldn’t give it the same level of strength, to the way Bloomberg approached it in the early years with The Bloomberg Way, in order to have a framework where they could take a very diverse group of people and turn them into quite good journalists very quickly.

Most of the young people in London are fresh out of journalism school or had been bloggers. The more senior people, who I call consulting editors, are essentially freelancers I have on contract; I’ve been able to bring in some very experienced people to offer almost one-to-one editing tuition to that staff team, but also to manage the flow of input from the community. It’s almost always a staff editor who publishes material from the community to its fully published state on the site. That’s for quality reasons and it’s to try to reinforce the Jimmy Wales ambition of having a neutral point of view. But it’s also very important, because we’re based in the U.K., to meet U.K. libel and defamation rules, because there’s no First Amendment protecting us here.

We’re also been doing Facebook Live meetings of our news conference in the mornings and afternoons, and we’re putting them out to our users on Slack.

We also have very specific call-outs; we published one recently about Harvey Weinstein and the failure of the Weinstein company. That’s a request to participate on a specific story. In an ideal world, you could almost imagine handing that story, effectively, to the public.

So far, there are more people observing than there are participating. But I’m very hopeful that if we get the formula right, it will be both transparent and responsive to ideas that people in the community may have about story directions.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency is our most-read category of content. That is probably because we have — initially at least — a very large percentage of male readers, who are in California and are Wikipedia fans or fans of Jimmy’s. But lately 20 to 30 percent of our readers are women, which is great.

People have accused us of being snowflakes, they’ve accused us of being too liberal, they’ve accused us of being part of the mainstream media conspiracy, and all that. But generally there’s been incredibly little abuse either of the staff or of other people on the site. The “talk” areas have been remarkably good-humored and remarkably constructive so far. When I was a head of international content on digital at CNN, the commentaries on stories were a hideous battleground. So there is something to be said for the kind of relationship that is implicit in a product that has Jimmy Wales behind it. It is a product for people of good will — which I know sounds ridiculously naive, but so far it’s working quite well.

But we do not do comment or opinion. We eradicate from our own work what could be perceived as commentary or opinion. That means really thinking of the language that we use, and not being glib, not using loaded words that can get dropped into stories almost by accident. It’s an incredibly good discipline.

I did create a section of stories called Essays. We have a retired French diplomat who’s been using them to write substantial tours of the horizon, if you like, about specific subjects of world development and diplomacy. They’re not quite commentary because they are written from a point of view of expertise, but we’ve extracted most of the commentary, or what could be perceived as opinion, from them. It’s a way of getting somebody with specific knowledge to write in a way that allows that knowledge to come to the fore, but it probably would not be a Wikipedia entry, if you see what I mean.

One of the biggest differences between us and Wikipedia is that individual experience and individual reporting are completely out of the question at Wikipedia, whereas they’re actually what we’re looking for at WikiTribune. In a sense, Wikipedia is is all about correct annotation and attribution of a secondary source, whereas here what we’re after in many cases is witnessing and a kind of specific knowledge.

But journalism by itself is an observed art. There are facts in it, but there is always a certain amount of interpretation in it as well — in the way you present the facts, the words you use, particularly in first-person journalism. The pursuit of objectivity, or the pursuit of neutrality, has to go beyond just having a balancing quote from somebody else. It’s genuinely trying to think of what a neutral perspective would be. Where I think it becomes difficult: I don’t think you can do stories like “Slavery: Good or bad? You decide.” I think that sort of binary version of neutrality is not really appropriate for journalism.

So, for us, it’s a matter of writing a sentence and saying, “Can I stand it up? Is it justified by the link I’m attaching? Is it justified by the background I’ve attached? Have I explained how I got to that conclusion?” A lot of what we’re doing is exposing the journey that the journalist or community member is taking to get to the perspective that they’re trying to communicate. What is the information that they’ve consumed to lead them to that conclusion? A huge amount of it, journalistically, is showing our own work, which is why we try — not always perfectly or successfully — to publish our transcripts and interviews and that kind of thing.

The priority for me, being the editor rather than the CEO or the founder, has been to get the content into a shape where I’m confident that it is interesting, credible, draws people in, and causes people to discuss and talk about it and want to add to it. It’s also a very interesting phenomenon to ask people to contribute to news rather than to a collection of facts. It’s a big ask to ask somebody to go in and write, from scratch, a news story.

Our stories also tend to last. We’ve been very careful to try and preserve the conversations that are associated with the story as much as we’re preserving the story itself, so stories don’t just last 6 or 12 or 24 hours; they are being added to over a period of weeks and months.

I’m very proud of the piece we did on #metoo. We didn’t just do it on Weinstein, we did it once he had become symbolically something much larger. That story has been running and been updated 20 or 30 times in the last month. Nothing is static; an article is never quite finished. Some consumers can be unnerved by that, because the story will change in nature the second or third time they look at it. But our site lets you look at the history of the story and see every change that’s been made to it since it was first conceived. So there’s a huge level of quite scary transparency behind that.

And then, I would say, Jimmy’s focus is still on the conversion of people into contributors. The ambition would be, maybe in a couple of years, to have 50 percent of the content contributed by staff and 50 percent of the content contributed by users, and then over time for it to have a much higher percentage coming from the users.

That’s been a really interesting experience, which I will one day write something about. It’s constantly in flux. We have a set of kind of core documents, and what I try to do is constantly review them and update them against what we’re actually achieving.

So, for example, we have a checklist to do our daily briefing. The journalists theoretically go through a checklist each day and ask: Is the story that I’m contemplating a WikiTribune story? If it’s a WikiTribune story, what criteria does it meet: Does it have multiple points of view? Is it complex? Is it going to last more than a day? Those are the kinds of things that they look at. The principle of it is that it should allow even the most inexperienced person, including the audience, in fact, to create a more or less credible piece of content.