[Foundation-l] Ensuring veracity of articles based on print sources

[Andrew Gray]

On 08/10/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at 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 at dunelm.org.uk