WikiFactCheck will provide instant fact-checking

Sep 10, 2010 by Rebecca MacLary

Almost everyone has heard of (and used) Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Now there’s a new service around that might just get a lot of traffic. WikiFactCheck will provide users with an [almost] instant source of fact-verification when it comes to news, websites, or other digital media product. The brainchild of journalist Andrew Lih, the site will offer “a neutral point of view” and, “using verifiable information from reliable sources to provide an augmented news platform through annotation, correlation and visualization.”

Andrew Lih- Creator Of WikiFactCheck

According to Lih, WikiFactCheck “is a project to provide rapid, crowdsourced fact checking of news events and factual data.” Lih came up with the idea for WikiFactCheck in response to a challenge to fact check Sunday morning news shows, and he hopes that the full version may be used to verify any digital media product.

The Wiki About page informs readers that “The long term goal is to imagine that any television newscast, web site, or digital media news product would have WikiFactCheck results available simultaneously, so that information consumers could immediately evaluate the truth value of what they are consuming. If you’re watching the State of the Union address by the President (or the other party’s response afterwards) you would have an overlay on your television screen with the WikiFactCheck results of how accurate the statistics were, or how true one’s portrayal of historical events was. Or it might be on your iPad or iPhone, in an application that shows you the fact check results for an event in real time, in a Twitter-like feed.”

Right now, users and editors of the wiki site are Wikipedia editors, but eventually, Lih says, “The near term users of WikiFactCheck will likely be ‘news junkies’ or those who do deeper engagement with the news.”

If you’re interested in becoming a part of WikiFactCheck, go to the wiki site main page and read the “ways to start getting involved” section.

Thanks WikiFactCheck, Stinky Journalism

http://twitter.com/citizentools Christoph Berendes
Hype much? Technically, “[X] will provide instant fact-checking” could be true in the same way that “[X] will cure all forms of cancer” could be true, depending on when you pull the trigger on “will” (w/i a year, 10 years? before or after the Singularity?)But when you review http://meetthefacts.com, an actually operating fact checking site, you see:1. It takes one to two hours for someone to extract the statements to fact check from a morning talk show. For instance: http://meetthefacts.com/2010/07/27/statements-to-fact-check-07-25-2010/2. It takes 2-3 hours to fact check each particular statement. For instance: http://meetthefacts.com/tag/fc-20100711/So, if one of the folks at MTF extracts 10 statements from an hour of Meet the Press in one hour, and then check all ten of those statements, it might take 22 – 30 person hours.What’s your estimate for when WikiFactCheck can deliver a coordinated 25 person hour effort in, say, 2 hours or less (which I’d be happy to call “instant”). What’s the basis for your estimate?[I intend no criticism of WikiFactCheck.org - they're starting up, and it's great to have ambitious goals. I have no association with MeetTheFacts.com. I'm simply a fan of people actually getting work done and distressed by hype that raises the bar on expectations for no good reason.]