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UX for fact checking, arbitration, correctness + staleness will be critical to the survival of information societies SO not having a good way to retire these i

UX for fact checking, arbitration, correctness + staleness will be critical to the survival of information societies SO not having a good way to retire these is the same issue as twitter's 'get the facts' banner IMO wikipedia is the only organization that's solved it, and my sense from the outside (I've only written 1 article) is that it's with editor-gatekeepers, not with tools (though there are some bots)

gbear605 6y ago
With Wikipedia, it’s a combination of editors that monitor articles and just the sheer number of people who looks at Wikipedia every day. Even if 1% of those make a change on a given day, that’s a huge number of small modifications.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tomrod 6y ago
My colleagues and I call this "true-ing" -- crowdsourcing for new intel, establishing trust metrics with open doors for new participants, essentially giving a channel for bull* to be called on bad data.
- sojournerc 6y ago
  I also think about all the true things that have been published never to return because they were against the orthodoxy or accepted thinking at the time. Easier to validate what's been carried forward, much harder to find what should've been but wasn't.
techbio 6y ago
This is a “cache-invalidation/naming things” problem :)
- wool_gather 6y ago
  I doubt it's anywhere near that hard. SO has crowdsourced "this is correct" (and "this is wrong") baked into its core in its voting system. One more button for "this is obsolete" would do a world of good. It wouldn't solve the whole thing -- there would be some subtlety that would be lost. But it would be at least as good as the "this is correct" signal that we already have. Unfortunately the company has basically lost interest in its public site as a knowledge archive in the last 5-6 years and has stopped even considering problems like this, let alone working on them.
  - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
    Could you expand the last part on SO having lost interest in their public site(s)?
swalsh 6y ago
Wikipedia demonstrates that an authoritarian governance model is more functional than essentially anarchy. But that does not mean we should settle for it. Wikipedia is known for its restrictive culture. A lot of good information does not make it past the guards. We can probably do better.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I remember when Wikipedia first started cracking-down on “Trivia” sections. And yet sites like Everything2 still died. What if Wikipedia allowed articles to have two versions: the normal, policed, articles we have today - and adding a “post anything, as long as you provide citations” version for sticking all the trivia and extra details that would normally not be allowed on a main Wikipedia page.
  - dtech 6y ago
    The talk page functions as the latter for contested issues at least
  - bawolff 6y ago
    What would be the benefit of that over just having a different site dedicated to that. I think there is plenty of room for all types of sites on the internet, but they don't have to all be hosted by the same group.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  Wikipedia is more restrictive than I’d like. It’s also pretty good considering how hard it is to have an audience of everybody. I don’t know how it could do better.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Wikipedia is not really an authoritarian model. You can't be appointed owner of an article or anything. That's not to say there aren't rules, but rules are decided by collective decisions (or in practise the collective decisions of people from 15 years ago) and are implemented based on argument, debate and evidence. Usually when people say an "authoritarian" governance model, they mean there is a ruler or small class of elites, and whatever they say goes, no discussion, no debate, no appeal. That is very much not what wikipedia is like. It is however what a lot of social media sites are like (good luck appealing a fb moderator decision)
nailer 6y ago
### Update for 2020: I'm a correctness answerer on Stack Overflow. Top 0.14% on the site. There are established ways to overthrow correct but outdated answers (I've just used one). They have emerged organically through the community. This is mainly through necessity, especially in the JavaScript world where the standard library was missing, and now includes, nearly everything one would expect in a modern programming environment and much more. However it would be nice for highly upvoted answers that replace existing marked correct answers that are no longer getting votes to be marked as the 'community accepted' answer.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  > There are established ways to overthrow correct but outdated answers (I've just used one). What are they? I've tried to edit accepted answers that contain inaccuracies or outdated info and faced difficulty getting those edits approved. It is a time consuming and frustrating process in my experience.

gbear605 6y ago

With Wikipedia, it’s a combination of editors that monitor articles and just the sheer number of people who looks at Wikipedia every day. Even if 1% of those make a change on a given day, that’s a huge number of small modifications.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tomrod 6y ago

My colleagues and I call this "true-ing" -- crowdsourcing for new intel, establishing trust metrics with open doors for new participants, essentially giving a channel for bull* to be called on bad data.

sojournerc 6y ago
I also think about all the true things that have been published never to return because they were against the orthodoxy or accepted thinking at the time. Easier to validate what's been carried forward, much harder to find what should've been but wasn't.

techbio 6y ago

This is a “cache-invalidation/naming things” problem :)

wool_gather 6y ago
I doubt it's anywhere near that hard. SO has crowdsourced "this is correct" (and "this is wrong") baked into its core in its voting system. One more button for "this is obsolete" would do a world of good. It wouldn't solve the whole thing -- there would be some subtlety that would be lost. But it would be at least as good as the "this is correct" signal that we already have. Unfortunately the company has basically lost interest in its public site as a knowledge archive in the last 5-6 years and has stopped even considering problems like this, let alone working on them.
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago
  Could you expand the last part on SO having lost interest in their public site(s)?

swalsh 6y ago

Wikipedia demonstrates that an authoritarian governance model is more functional than essentially anarchy. But that does not mean we should settle for it. Wikipedia is known for its restrictive culture. A lot of good information does not make it past the guards. We can probably do better.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I remember when Wikipedia first started cracking-down on “Trivia” sections. And yet sites like Everything2 still died. What if Wikipedia allowed articles to have two versions: the normal, policed, articles we have today - and adding a “post anything, as long as you provide citations” version for sticking all the trivia and extra details that would normally not be allowed on a main Wikipedia page.
- dtech 6y ago
  The talk page functions as the latter for contested issues at least
- bawolff 6y ago
  What would be the benefit of that over just having a different site dedicated to that. I think there is plenty of room for all types of sites on the internet, but they don't have to all be hosted by the same group.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
Wikipedia is more restrictive than I’d like. It’s also pretty good considering how hard it is to have an audience of everybody. I don’t know how it could do better.
bawolff 6y ago
Wikipedia is not really an authoritarian model. You can't be appointed owner of an article or anything. That's not to say there aren't rules, but rules are decided by collective decisions (or in practise the collective decisions of people from 15 years ago) and are implemented based on argument, debate and evidence. Usually when people say an "authoritarian" governance model, they mean there is a ruler or small class of elites, and whatever they say goes, no discussion, no debate, no appeal. That is very much not what wikipedia is like. It is however what a lot of social media sites are like (good luck appealing a fb moderator decision)

nailer 6y ago

### Update for 2020: I'm a correctness answerer on Stack Overflow. Top 0.14% on the site. There are established ways to overthrow correct but outdated answers (I've just used one). They have emerged organically through the community. This is mainly through necessity, especially in the JavaScript world where the standard library was missing, and now includes, nearly everything one would expect in a modern programming environment and much more. However it would be nice for highly upvoted answers that replace existing marked correct answers that are no longer getting votes to be marked as the 'community accepted' answer.

shkkmo 6y ago
> There are established ways to overthrow correct but outdated answers (I've just used one). What are they? I've tried to edit accepted answers that contain inaccuracies or outdated info and faced difficulty getting those edits approved. It is a time consuming and frustrating process in my experience.