Thread:Comments:Despite defectors, U.S. electoral college affirms Trump presidency/Kudos for an objective article/reply

Well, thanks. The different properties of news versus encyclopedic writing prevent the Wikipedian approach from working here; so Wikinews goes about achieving neutrality differently &mdash; each wikimedian project works out its own approach to the crucial issue of neutrality. Wikipedia's approach is, as you allude, a matter of applying many editors and however much time it takes. That can work remarkably well (in practice though not in theory, as the saying goes) if you've got the time. By the nature of news, though, we don't have time for open-ended discussion of how to tell a story; and news is, by definition, vetted before publication. We can't publish a pile of facts and later fix the mistakes or rethink the overall presentation. We need an approach to neutrality that can be applied simply, quickly, and reliably by a reporter who has opinions of their own (if we limited reportage to Zen masters who reserve judgement on everything... well, it sure wouldn't be an open wiki). The main trick is to transform the story into just objective facts: we don't ourselves analyze the story, we don't endorse opinions or controversial claims, but we can still report objectively, with high confidence, that somebody else expressed an opinion, made a claim. Like the difference between "the fire started in a third-floor apartment" and "fire officials said the fire started in a third-floor apartment".