WikiFactCheck:Village pump

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Icons to indicate fallacies

Eekim suggested creating a Village pump to discuss ideas, so here we is the first idea. I suggest we come up with icons to indicate various fallacies. An example of the type of icons that might be used can be found here. Danny 17:20, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Truth Scale

Not all statements can be classified as binary True/False statements. We need to create a scale to measure the veracity of the various statements by a number of different criteria. This will eventually allow us to give a "score" to the subject under discussion. Danny 17:41, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, some of the better ideas come from sites like Politifact with a sliding scale. One of the more interesting ideas is from Kevin Drum in 2004, where he did a "quantitative review" of the Bush v Kerry presidential debate [1]. May need to test out some ideas in the meatime. -- Fuzheado 18:50, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Truth is a quaint concept. In the absence of evidence to convince me otherwise, outside of the driest triple-blind scientific experiments, all information is propaganda. From choice of wording to punctuation, the tiniest little details can add bias - whether intentional or not. This cannot be expressed by a simple sliding true/false sliding scale. Most falsehood is not deliberate -

  • It can be limited by the persons vocabulary - they may simply not have the words to convey accurate meaning
  • Revulsion of subject matter - this will distort no matter how hard you try on subjects like FGM for example
  • The whole rainbow of cognitive bias [2] and fallacious arguments [3]

This is only my immediate list. I bet you thought this was a simple task? It's not. And I haven't even touched upon the idea of neurological relativity. --Cynic 06:06, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Color coding statements

One possibility would be to develop a color coding scheme for statements to denote their factuality and bias. In the Face the Nation, August 15, 2010 sample page, I used bold, red, and yellow highlighting to mark a statement that was truthful but deceptive. False statements can be marked with bold with white fonts on a black background, etc., so that eventually a complete color coding system can be developed. What do people think of this idea? Danny 02:59, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Considering that some statements that are fact-checked will turn out to be true, and this should be presented, how about a red=false, yellow=half-true/questionable, green=true scheme? Mike 05:40, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
What about highlighting things that are questionable - that we're not yet sure of the truth-status of, but need to be checked? --Tamar 04:04, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Necessary to include full transcripts?

As I was reading Face the Nation, August 15, 2010, it occurred to me that the statements requiring fact-checking are kind of swamped in the rest of the text. How necessary is it to reproduce entire interviews? Would it be sufficient to quote the statements in question, with context? This also might be a copyright issue.Mike 06:57, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

  • This problem could be eliminated if we could include the videos plus time coding as to where the statements are located. If we do include full transcripts they should probably be broken up, topically perhaps, for ease of reading. Danny 08:33, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
    • It's a good question, for now I'd say let's keep the full transcript up as a testing area, and see what makes sense in terms of markup. Later on of course we'll have to be rather particular about the quantity of text. -- Fuzheado 21:50, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Marking up long sections of text could become cumbersome for the reader even with the inclusion of the Cite extension. As an example, I was about to mark up the statement, "unemployment among African-Americans is now 12.5 percent" made by Bob Schieffer on FTN 08-15-10. The plan was to include an external link to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics with an annotation that the unemployment rate was actually 15.6%. Using Cite, the user would have to scroll (or follow the link) all the way down to the bottom of the page to see the annotation. It would be much better if there were a way to include the text of the annotation inline - perhaps via a mouseover dialog - so as not to interrupt the flow of reading the transcript. Ingmar 18:54, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
    • That's a good point. In the Veropedia code there was an extension to do something similar--allow text to appear as a balloon. I wonder if something like that could be developed here. Danny 19:22, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
      • Ingmar welcome! I think that's a critical next step, is to prototype and figure out how to annotate in place, rather than having to put things in footnotes. Any extensions or other MediaWiki implementations that do this well are appreciated! -- Fuzheado 14:31, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Resource list

It would be great to begin developing a list of websites that people can use as to fact-check. There's no way to be exhaustive, but we can make a list that covers a good many types of information. For example: Thomas U.S. Census Bureau National Weather Service As the list grows we can sub-divide it by theme, eg financial, legal, legislative, etc. And there will probably need to be a discussion page where the community debates what counts as a reliable source. --Tamar 21:24, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Kick start Election season

As election season gets into full swing now, I'd like to bring up the question of what activities would be the most interesting to keep on top of. It's notable that a number of "Tea Party" candidates are not showing up on the Sunday morning talk shows (ie. O'Donnell) so they are becoming less interesting an avenue than in the past. List here the most significant political debates or closely watched races that merit consideration. I'll start with:

  • Brown vs. Fiorina in California
  • Christine O'Donnell resume, which has been the subject of much investigation
    • University of Oxford credentials [4]
  • To be less biased (i.e. left-leaning, as I am), I would think Brown vs. Fiorina would make more sense. If we cover Christine O'Donnell, we should also cover Alvin Greene or someone else of the ilk - Ingmar 20:42, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Coming Activity

Starting today, I'm going to be launching the page for the US Elections 2010. There will be 43 journalism students from USC who will be involved with editing and maintaining pages related to California initiatives, specifically:

I've also installed the entire Semantic MediaWiki bundle, which includes the very slick Widgets feature, that will allow incorporating more "Web 2.0" objects. Also, the anti-spam features have been tweaked significantly so hopefully we'll be less bothered by spammers, but I appreciate the help of User:Ingmar and User:Danny to help combat these problems.

Hope to see some great activity for the next week, and onwards. -- Fuzheado 12:17, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

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