Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/21/trust-no-one.html
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Fact checking is the holy crap, dark art of the Transcended Adepts of Infomancy. I’m in awe how anyone can get to the bottom of anything in this mess of angry spaghettios and worms the world of facts has become.
Oh it’s easy - the other day someone told me I was wrong about something I spent years working on based on a reading of a Wikipedia article.
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I hope you apologized.
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The thing about Wikipedia is if you know about the subject you notice the errors in the articles.
Then you think, perhaps other people who know about different things notice errors in those articles.
Before long, existential doubt opens up about all of Wikipedia.
Thats true, and I use three considerations
- often the ‘errors’ are really differences of opinion or emphasis
- less controvetsial topics are far less prone to 1) (and vive versa), and
- despite that wikipedia remains an excellent place to start researching a subject (but a terrible place to end that research)
That’s exactly the reaction I had years ago with Newspaper stories. If they had all the details of simple, small town stories like the ones I was involved in wrong, how could I even guess about the accuracy of the other stories? I was reminded of this a couple of months ago when I was interviewed by local TV, radio and the paper over some good business news. Each had a completely different story from the same events and they were nearly unrecognizable.
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