Wikidata Mailing List,
Hello. I would like to describe some unfolding developments pertaining to real-time fact-checking and Wikidata.
Imagine being able to check, in real-time, if a document has any informational, warning, or error messages with respect to its factuality or any steps of its reasoning. Tools for authoring and reviewing documents, in these regards, would be useful across sectors, across industry, academia, military, and government, with specific applicability to journalism, encyclopedias, digital textbooks, and science.
New schemas, formats, and protocols are presently being considered, developed, and specified pertaining to real-time fact-checking and other document services scenarios. Document services are a generalization over services for documents such as: spelling checking, grammar checking, proofreading, fact checking, and mathematical proof and argumentation checking. Document services are relevant to both document authoring and document reviewing scenarios.
The following example showcases the idea that Wikidata could be of use for performing real-time fact-checking on an HTML document:
<html>
<head>
<base href="https://www.example.org/document.xhtml" />
<meta name="fact-checking-selector" content="[role~='fact']" />
<link rel="fact-checking-service-provider" href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:FactCheck" />
</head>
<body>
<span role="fact">HTML and MathML content</span>
<div role="fact">HTML and MathML content</div>
</body>
</html>
As indicated above, document authors could utilize document metadata to recommend the use of a specific fact-checking service, e.g. a Wikidata-based fact-checking service. End-users could also configure their Web browsers to make use of specific fact-checking services. Multiple services could be used simultaneously.
A W3C Document Services Community Group is in a proposal stage to discuss document services and to explore standardization topics. If discussing and working on these or related ideas is of interest to you, please do feel free to support the creation of the group and to join the group (https://www.w3.org/community/groups/proposed/#services).
I hope that real-time fact-checking is an interesting Wikidata scenario. Please do feel free to read more about these ideas here:
https://www.w3.org/community/argumentation/wiki/Document_Services
https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/19
I look forward to discussing these ideas with you. Feedback, comments, ideas, and suggestions are welcomed. Thank you.
Best regards,
Adam Sobieski