LarrySanger

(1) Articulate and elaborate a neutrality policy. (I was the originator of Wikipedia's neutrality policy, via Nupedia, and I plumped for its adoption against much resistance.)

(2) We're democratic. Extreme views will tend to be ranked down.

(3) If we're flooded with people from one point of view, we'll actively recruit people from opposing points of view, to make sure we have a balanced community. In a democracy, a balanced community will mean a balanced vote.

(4) There are technical things we can do too.

Good question. The answer what you indicate at the end: we delegate matters of verification and trust to our sources, to begin with, anyway. We are a "mere aggregator," but we do not aggregate articles; we aggregate facts which we find in articles.

Of what special value is that, you ask? Well, a large part of the reason it take so long to catch up with the news is that facts are spread out across many different articles, but the articles are also redundant with each other and with previous reporting. Finding the facts that are really important, but which you didn't already know, is a little like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Basically, Infobitt has us pooling our news-hunting activities and benefiting from the results. Not unlike what Wikipedia does for the facts that make up general knowledge.

Expect? Well, I was sensible enough to know that, probably, it would fail. So when it started taking off, I (like Jimbo and everyone participating) was very excited. I'm capable of dreaming up lots of stuff so I'm sure I dreamed of spectacular success. Did I expect it, though? No.

Infobitt is different from WikiNews, and most similar citizen journalism websites, because WikiNews basically involves amateurs attempting to write news stories. As a result the work ends up unimportant, old, poorly sourced, and/or not well written (writing very well is difficult). Journalists are paid money because they have rare skills.

Infobitt does not feature amateurs doing what journalists do. It features amateurs summarizing facts gathered and carefully expressed by (one hopes) slightly more careful and better-trained professionals.

It's very different from Reddit because Reddit features a single source per story and, typically, just a headline. The headlines are ranked by counting simple up or down votes. By contrast, (1) we collect many facts per story, (2) from multiple sources, (3) expressed in full sentences, and (4) we rank the facts (and whole collections of facts, called bitts) by dragging and dropping them into a rank, rather than up- and down-vote. So, we're very different there.

No comment about Jimmy Wales first calling me co-founder then downplaying my role. I and others have said all I need to on that subject.

I think you're asking why you need to provide a reliable source for claims that, if false, could damage a person's reputation irreparably. Is that right? That's what you're confused about?