A “Wikifacts” sister project is a great idea. “Wikifacts” seems distinct from both Wikinews and Wikidata. With some schemas for facts, defining their structure and interrelations, one could, however, utilize Wikidata as a backend.

Brainstorming, while I’m sure that those in these mailing lists are more familiar with what’s possible with wiki templates, with a “Wikifacts” sister project, one could envision a wiki template for explicit facts. Perhaps such a wiki template could resemble:

With such a wiki template, editors could add explicit facts to Wikinews and Wikipedia articles.

End-users could hover over explicit facts in Wikinews or Wikipedia articles to view information (e.g. the number of informational messages, warnings, or errors) about the facts in tooltips and could click on a fact – or on a superscript hyperlink symbol – to navigate to the fact’s “Wikifacts” article.

The use of explicit facts in Wikinews or Wikipedia articles could, potentially, create new “Wikifacts” articles or synchronize with existing “Wikifacts” articles. Whenever a fact were updated or annotated via the “Wikifacts” project website, the editors of any dependent Wikinews or Wikipedia articles could receive emails, resembling how they can opt to watch articles for edits. Wikinews and Wikipedia editors could receive emails so as to be able to revisit an article if or when any facts upon which the article depends change.

A “Wikifacts” project could also serve as a fact-checking resource for a set of end-users broader than the editors of Wikinews and Wikipedia articles. Through an API, end-users could perform real-time fact checking via “Wikifacts” while authoring or reviewing documents.

Best regards,

Adam

P.S.: Thank you for the information about the Wikipragmatica proposal.

From: Douglas Clark
Sent: Thursday, February 4, 2021 6:50 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Idea of a new project: Wikifacts ?

I proposed a project, WikiPragmatica, that can support fake news detection. The retained context of the paraphrase graph can identify fake news patterns similar to what MIT does with their detector.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 12:42 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

Does Wikinews cover this aspect?

From: Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Chris Gates via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 4, 2021 8:20 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Chris Gates <vermont@vtwp.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Idea of a new project: Wikifacts ?

Hello,

Independent of my opinions on the validity of such a new Wikimedia project, there is currently an experiment of similar goals (and potentially structure) over at Twitter:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwatch-a-community-based-approach-to-misinformation.html

Best,

Verm

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 2:17 PM Leinonen Teemu <teemu.leinonen@aalto.fi> wrote:

Hi all,

Has there been any discussion to start a new Wikimedia project focusing on fact checking?

Fact checking of course is in the core of editing Wikipedia, but I was thinking about dedicated wiki-site that is dedicated for fact checking of current events and news. Why this would be important?

(1) There are many fact checking site in the English speaking world but much less elsewhere. I am afraid that there is still greater need for fact checking in the rest of the world. {{Citation needed}}

(2) Our community is very well educated to do fact checking the wiki-way. Again internationally, many of our community members are real fact champions in their home countries and language groups. The practice of Wikipedia could be applied to fact checking of fast moving current events and news, too.

(3) This could help us to get new young people to the movement, as editing Wikipedias is not anymore so easy to start (because they are so good already).

(4) In many parts of the world, fact checking can also be dangerous. With our anonymous and community driven practices and services we could protect the fact checkers in many parts of the world.

I am not sure what is the state of the Wikinews, but my impression is that it is not really working. It was a good idea, but maybe wiki or wiki-way is not the way to produce news. Also the beautiful idea of citizen journalism has not really become reality. Maybe we could try if wiki and the wki-way works better in fact checking.

Peace,

- Teemu

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