On 08/10/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
But of course.
The problem is, the original proposal here was to
deal with people
making up sources - an explicitly bad-faith action.
But the suggested
system is a system that is equally suceptible to
being gamed in
bad-faith. You want to game this? You make a false
claim with regards
to a reputable (but hard to identify) work. Done.
So instituting this system wouldn't deal with the
bad-faith people in
any way, and just create vast amounts of (admittedly
automatible, but
still) make-work for "verifiers". Which doesn't
really help the
project, it just plasters around the original
problem...
So you do not believe in having any organized method
of fact checking? That people should only fact check
disputed articles? I am not sure what your position
is after reading the above.
My position is that the proposal originally suggested in this thread -
of confirming the existence of books so as to deal with bad-faith fake
sources - just won't work, because it means a good deal of work but is
trivially easy for the people who we assume are trying to fool us to
keep fooling us. We need fact checking. But having a system that
sounds like fact checking and looks like fact checking but doesn't
work is a net detriment.
I think at some point an organized method of fact
checking needs to happen, although it is debatable if
we are at that point yet. My understanding of this
method is it would assign fact checkers work "per
book" rather than "per article" which is IMHO *much*
more efficient.
Yes, this would be the most sensible way of doing it. We just need to
find some way of apportioning the checking load in a sane manner.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk