Great project, but this seems like a classic example of a programmer naively assuming a technical solution can solve a social problem.
Isn't that just setting a high bar? It might not solve an issue, but it could help.
Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
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Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#82Great project, but this seems like a classic example of a programmer naively assuming a technical solution can solve a social problem.
This is more a communication standard than a complicated tech solution. A communication standard for fact checks from public primary sources.
Coding this wasn't actually that complicated, figuring out a design that enables readers to review the fact checking as easily as possible and enables fact checkers to collaborate easily took a lot of experimentation though. Although even that is still very much a work in progress.
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#83IMHO reputation is important to build into the base level for a platform like this. Allowing anon registrations and commenting will eventually lead to a lot of noise and abuse of the platform for misinformation. I think some sort of verification of a person's qualifications on particular subject areas and then allowing them to only "fact check" on those qualified areas is required here to have an effective platform t…
I'm not 100% sure that lack of specific subject matter expertise should prevent people from commenting. In many cases experts are the best people to go to, but in other cases they can represent entrenched ideas that are precisely the ones that need rethinking.
For an example, I have read writings of many experts in mental disorders that completely ignore changes in the DSM V. I do not know if the experts are not aware of the changes or don't agree with them, but the way mental disorders are classified underwent some significant changes and I can quote direct lines from the DSM V that strongly contradict the claims of experts.
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#84give beer to this guy!
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#85Great project, but this seems like a classic example of a programmer naively assuming a technical solution can solve a social problem.
I think there is a technical solution to this problem though. A structured graph of supporting facts (including an analog of identity for the sources and corroborators, pointing to the edges) is an excellent datastructure for maintaining a record of reasoning and evidence for a statement of fact.
There is, of course, the social issue of convincing people that this is important, but the underlying issue is in part a technical one. I don't think it's fair to disqualify a solution based on the fact that involves technical work.
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia has flaws,too. 1. Your account need to have good history or social repo for your edits to be seriously considered by Wikipedia admins. 2. Admin can have their own set of bias and can decide to ignore edits. Remember Wikipedia is a centralized and under control of single entity, fact that they rely on donation doesn't change anything.
Just because something has flaws doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to do it.
There wasn't anything said about Wikipedia being a bad idea, but rather that it shouldn't be your sole source for fact-checking. I've learned that people only trust Wikipedia to the point at which it confirms their biases.
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What problem does this solve that existing reputation systems don't? To turn its slogan into an analogy: the New Yorker is high quality closed source software. If you disagree with the New Yorker, you can't file a bug report. You might say, "I wouldn't want to," either because of something on your end, or something on the New Yorker's end. Continuing the analogy, there are closed-source models, open-source-but-clos…
If the New Yorker makes a factual error, you will get a lot of public attention for correcting them, and it will be a big deal.
I truly believe that post-publication fact checking is a losing battle. If you take a sampling of redaction tweets by media outlets and compare their retweet counts to the retweet counts of the original posting you'll see that that is very much the case.
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#88By the way, clicking on a fact on Chrome iOS is not loading anything.
Safari on iOS isn’t working for me.
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not 100% sure that lack of specific subject matter expertise should prevent people from commenting. In many cases experts are the best people to go to, but in other cases they can represent entrenched ideas that are precisely the ones that need rethinking.
For an example, I have read writings of many experts in mental disorders that completely ignore changes in the DSM V. I do not know if the experts are not aware of the changes or don't agree with them, but the way mental disorders are classified underwent some significant changes and I can quote direct lines from the DSM V that strongly contradict the claims of experts.
> For an example, I have read writings of many experts in mental disorders that completely ignore changes in the DSM V.
Nitpick, but it's DSM 5; roman numerals were dropped after DSM IV.
> I do not know if the experts are not aware of the changes or don't agree with them
Almost certainly the latter. Lots of DSM V changes were, and are, controversial (even among people who acknowledge the existence of the problems the changes were intended to fix, the aisle solutions chosen are sometimes controversial.)
Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking
#90So, your examples are all "reporting about court cases" and you use court documents as your citations for facts. Court cases are as good as we have for determining facts, I suppose. (Though the error rate in court cases is quite high!) But 99.9999% of reporting isn't about court cases. Most reporting isn't about issues that will ever be litigated, and even those things that will be litigated, haven't been at the time…
Call me a pedant, but I'd say OP is enabling "consensus checking" I find the present day's fact checking wave is a misnomer. In a world where something is false, but sourced, most of what we call fact-checking would only reinforce mistruths. e.g. The ratio of circumference to diameter is exactly three to one [1][2][3] [1]: the Bible. [2]: pious scholars. [3]: low-tech experiments. Would be cool to see someone think c…
Offtopic, but the Bible does not actually use a value of 3 for pi: