[WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model
Charles Matthews
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
Sat Aug 8 07:32:30 UTC 2009
Carcharoth wrote:
> And I
> shudder to think of the duplicated effort in checking references. It
> would be great if you could look through an article and see that 5
> people you trusted had ticked off most of the references as
> "verified".
Hmm, in my experience the majority of finds of inaccuracy in articles
come from correlation with another article, or at least from some
outside view raising a "that's odd" response. This discussion does raise
a suspicion that we still operate a somewhat naive generic fact-checking
approach: any page that is thoughtful about what we mean when we say
"checking facts"? Of course there is one aspect relating to the way a
cited reference may not support a fact as stated. But we do want
something a bit smarter than "make-work" solutions for a site with many
millions of references. I was discussing "over-checking" at the
Cambridge meetup, where you don't so much check a single fact as
surround it with other related facts, from other sources, and assess for
consistency, as a way of bearing down on unreferenced claims, and that
of course goes for things where you don't have the exact reference handy.
Charles
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