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This wiki is for brainstorming and prototyping how a WikiFactCheck project can provide rapid, crowd-sourced fact checking of news events and verification of factual data.
Current projects:
Documenting Existing efforts as seen at #FactFest (November 2011)
Previous projects:
US Election 2010
Obama $200 million a day trip, 2010
Decision Points by George W. Bush
Martin Luther King Jr. quote about Osama Bin Laden
WikiFactcheck was submitted to the Knight News Challenge in 2010, and made it as far as the final round. Please read the proposal there
The project builds on Wikipedia's collaborative culture of maintaining a neutral point of view and using verifiable information from reliable sources to provide an augmented news platform through annotation, correlation and visualization.
Among the initial targets of fact checking include:
- Political speeches and debates
- Corporate press conferences
- Election campaign advertisements
- Credentials, CVs and matters of historical record
- US Sunday morning talk shows such as Meet The Press, This Week and Face the Nation (a target of noted critics such as Jay Rosen [1])
Easy ways to start getting involved:
- Visit the TO DO list and work on next steps or Join the Village pump discussions
- Pitch in to help the project to document Existing efforts in fact checking
- Click on a red link to start a page, or find out more on how to edit pages.
- Jump in and edit, add or comment on anything here. It's a wiki, after all.
- Fact checking resources
Media coverage
Sorted from most recent to oldest
- WikiFactCheck will provide instant fact-checking, Rebecca MacLary, The Daily Crowdsource, September 10th, 2010.
- WikiFactCheck Site Sets to CrowdSource Fact Checking, Sydney Smith, StinkyJournalism.org, August 30, 2010
- Journalism Professor Adds Wiki Sensibility To Crowdsourced Fact Checking: WikiFactCheck, Mike Masnick, TechDirt, August 17, 2010.
- Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking, Megan Garber, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, August 16, 2010.
Topics of interest
- Political calendar - Find out what's coming up, and what might need to be fact-checked
- Existing efforts - an inventory and evaluation of current fact checking operations: Politifact, FactCheck.org, Media Matters, Newsbusters, et al.
- Resources - Other resources for checking information.
- People - interesting journalists, critics and academics in this space
- Fact checking criteria - is factual accuracy binary, or a sliding scale?
- Best practices - successes and lessons from other fact check efforts
- Technical implementation - software choice, semantic wiki
- Content license - fact checking results be Creative Commons, noncommercial, otherwise?
- Development timeline - proposed timeline for development
- Controversies - a selection of controversies related to fact-checking
Possible ideas
- Congressional credentials - fact check the academic degrees, job experience, military service record of every sitting House and Senate member in Congress.
- Check the claims of businesses and their products. Does X really reduce high blood pressure? Do 4 out of 5 dentists really recommend? Etc.
- Add more
Background
With today's networked news audience involved with distributed data gathering, records processing, and field reporting via mobile devices, a new collaborative ecosystem has developed around content creation and curation.
Wikipedia has inspired many other projects from geographical mapping (OpenStreetMaps) to fictional narratives (Lostpedia) while many of its most valuable community practices go relatively unnoticed. The editing community, steeped in a culture of enforcing accurate citations and reliable sources, provides a model for real-time fact checking of news stories, a task too often neglected by mainstream media outlets.
Interested parties
Create an account, and sign below to be informed of developments. Or visit WikiFactCheck:To do and start participating there.
Contact
- Andrew Lih (alih _at_ usc.edu)
- An associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, Lih is the author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia. His involvement with Wikipedia started in 2003. He has been a speaker at Wikimania, Wikisym, AEJMC and other conferences related to online journalism and collaboration, and has been a commentator on CNN, BBC, PBS Newshour and NPR.
