RE: claim review question

Oh wow I love that you're doing this. 



The concept of determining the absolute veracity of some content could be
quite difficult for people other than the author(s). If the author is
creating content about themselves, particularly about their thoughts and
feelings, they might be telling the truth or fabricating it completely. That
kind of content could never be fact-checked usefully, but does require some
kind of qualifier similar to the type I brought up here a couple months ago.




What you're talking about instead are things that can be objectively,
consensually, agreed upon as true or false, fiction or non-fiction, in part
or completely, right? 

 

What makes more sense, to me, is to have individuals, Persons in schema
terms, "testify" to the veracity of the content at some moment in time. 

Just because one or more "experts" stand up and fact-check some content
doesn't guarantee the content is wholly or in part accurate. Instead what a
group of experts can do is testify to the veracity. An article published by
a credible Organization might seem like a noteworthy source for a
fact-check, but without a Person being identified, who knows whose opinion
from the Organization was used for the fact check? 

 

Realize also that one Person may have changing degrees of faith in the
veracity of content over time. People's opinions change. Just like a
fact-check becomes more valuable as credible people back it up, a fact-check
should also have mechanisms for becoming less valuable as the information it
was based on changes. 


So I think you should at least require a Person or Persons role in the fact
check and have knowsAbout as one of the required elements. If a Person can't
be added to a testimony about content with qualifiers that clearly state
they know about the issue, items and context, how valuable can their
testimony be? 

Also, unfortunately, certain audiences consider certain experts' testimony
more or less credible than others over time. It's a must to have the Persons
hyper-identified in the context of the article. This could be incredibly
valuable at creating unity where there's otherwise a lot of division in this
arena. 

 

Doing it with blockchain is awesome. As you proceed down this direction with
your career prepare to be shocked at how little record keeping there is in
areas you'd expect there to be nothing but record keeping. There are people
who would certainly NOT want data collected around them being blockchained.
History has never worked that way before. Many are uneasy about it. So don't
get discouraged if you get weird push-back - that just means your idea is
powerful. It is. It's excellent. 

 

-JP 

 

From: Emily Follett Campbell <emily.follettcampbell@concordia.ca> 
Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2022 11:04 AM
To: public-schemaorg@w3.org
Subject: claim review question

 

Hi,

 

I am a journalism student working on a thesis project of how a fact-checking
dApp might work by creating a blockchain repository of claim review
transactions and ratings and linking them to the structured data of claim
review articles. Would anyone be willing to share their opinion if this
makes sense? Is this a good idea? Can I publish this?