[Foundation-l] Ensuring veracity of articles based on print sources
Birgitte SB
birgitte_sb at yahoo.com
Sat Oct 7 21:44:25 UTC 2006
--- Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > Andrew Gray wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>Fundamentally, use of an offline (or subscription,
> etc) source is a
> >>good and sensible thing, but it requires a modicum
> of trust that we're
> >>getting a reliable link between the page and the
> information quoted;
> >>we can't get around this by preparing lists of
> reliable and unreliable
> >>texts, we can only get around this by someone
> "trusted" saying yes,
> >>I've looked at that, it's there.
> >>
> >
> > Everything should be checked and re-checked
> independently, but that's
> > only an ideal. We're already having difficulties
> getting software that
> > gives us a stable version that has only been
> checked for common
> > vandalism. In time we should go much further than
> that, and allow
> > statistically based algorithms that will give a
> measure of probably
> > accuracy based on the review of multiple readers.
> >
>
> Yes, a blind-vote citation-checking system in which
> aggregate results
> are captured. Once nice property of such a system
> is that the votes of
> good-faith, competent citation-checkers will
> correlate strongly with one
> another, while the votes of bad-faith and/or
> incompetent checkers will
> have a basically random distribution. This, of
> course, assumes no
> widespread collusion among checkers, but in most
> cases such collusion
> will be more trouble than its worth. In addition,
> it would be possible
> to seed the citations shown to checkers (even on an
> individual basis)
> with random false citations which they would be
> expected to flag as
> incorrect/fabricated. Access to open bibliographic
> catalogs would allow
> for the creation of completely random but quite
> legitimate-seeming
> citations, as it is only a matter a randomly picking
> a work returned by
> querying on the article's main subjects.
>
> I think it might also be useful to use the results
> of citation-checking
> as a feed into some sort of trust ecology.
> Fact-checking is mostly
> tedious, unrewarding work, and so the users who have
> shown themselves to
> be competent and reliable at it are probably going
> to be trustworthy or
> at least good-faith in other areas as well. This
> would of course not be
> the only input to a user's "trust rating", but
> probably one of the more
> significant ones.
>
>
I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea!
Birgitte SB
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