Journalism Professor Adds Wiki Sensibility To Crowdsourced Fact Checking: WikiFactCheck
from the that-seems-useful dept
We've talked about the public's desire for more real fact checking, as opposed to he-said/she-said style news reporting. And we've mentioned various programs that have brought crowdsourcing into the fact-checking game. And, now a USC journalism professor has put this all together to create a fact-checking wiki-based site, appropriately called WikiFactCheck.Digging down to facts tends to be what crowdsourcing is good at. The problem, of course, is that there often are some blurry lines around what is actually a "fact" and what is not. But, given the (some would say excessive) cultural focus at Wikipedia on forcing a "neutral point of view," I could see how a similar group of people could somewhat vehemently focus in on specific facts that can be proven true or false, rather than getting too bogged down in opinion vs. facts debates.
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Filed Under: fact checking, journalism, news, wikis
Companies: wikifactcheck
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Lightweight.
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Re: Lightweight.
How's your Wiki project coming along?
This sounds like a great idea to solve an annoying problem, what part of this project causes you such distress?
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Re: Re: Lightweight.
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Re: Re: Lightweight
Not distress, I have no qualms with the content of the site or its purpose. But the site itself seemed so insubstantial that it might blow away in a light breeze.
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How web journalism can make people seem hateful
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/08/16/internet.journalism.politics/index.html?hpt=Sbin
He is shocked at how many different opinions exist on the internet and how they start grouping together to form opinions. He argues that investigative blogging will lead to "a long future of biased, inflammatory "evidence" -- on both sides of the political spectrum.", well it may come true, but is more likely that types like Sara Palin and Andrew Breitbart will face a wall of criticism for being crazy and dumb respectively and that is just that, if people didn't agree or didn't see something wrong there wouldn't be some many voices talking about those types in a negative manner. He argues that people are not capable of rational thinking because he thinks people will be overcome by "motivated cognition" which it is true in a individual level but it fails to materialize in groups, I think he is afraid of the mob mentality and that is a valid criticism, it does happen like in the case of child pornography but that is not something exclusive to bloggers or the internet in general it affects big ol' media too, to which he pre-empts saying that big ol' media is accountable because they have managers, which is not true a blogger has to answer to other bloggers that yeld as much power as that one do.
He even manage to contracdit himself saying "But many bloggers are unencumbered by the integrity of balance, and the result was a viral video that led to an innocent women's firing.", first he was talking about how people were derailing Andrew Breitbart for his actions and then he uses that actions for which he(Breitbart) was being derailed as proof of no regulations mechanism in the blogosphere.
Seriously, what are those people thinking?
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Re:
Seriously, what are those people thinking?"
Big ol' media are the same idiots that fell for this in the first place. They didn't do any fact checking and ran with the story. So they are trying to lay blame else where.
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Re: Bias
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