Misplaced Pages's volunteer editor community has the responsibility of fact-checking Misplaced Pages's content. Their aim is to curb the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation by the website.
Misplaced Pages is considered one of the major free open source websites, where millions can read, edit and post their views for free. Therefore Misplaced Pages takes the effort to provide its readers with well-verified sources. Meticulous fact-checking is an aspect of the broader reliability of Misplaced Pages.
Various academic studies about Misplaced Pages and the body of criticism of Misplaced Pages seek to describe the limits of Misplaced Pages's reliability, document who uses Misplaced Pages for fact-checking and how, and what consequences result from this use. Misplaced Pages articles can have poor quality in many ways including self-contradictions. Those poor articles require improvement.
Large platforms including YouTube and Facebook use Misplaced Pages's content to confirm the accuracy of the information in their own media collections.
Using Misplaced Pages for fact-checking
Misplaced Pages serves as a public resource for access to genuine information. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic was an important topic on which people relied on Misplaced Pages for genuine information. Seeking public trust is a major part of Misplaced Pages's publication philosophy. Various reader polls and studies have reported public trust in Misplaced Pages's process for quality control. In general, the public uses Misplaced Pages to counter fake news.
YouTube fact-checking
At the 2018 South by Southwest conference, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made the announcement that YouTube was using Misplaced Pages to fact check videos which YouTube hosts. No one at YouTube had consulted anyone at Misplaced Pages about this development, and the news at the time was a surprise. The intent at the time was for YouTube to use Misplaced Pages as a counter to the spread of conspiracy theories. This is done by adding new information boxes under some YouTube videos, thereby, attracting conspiracy theorists.
Facebook fact-checking
Facebook uses Misplaced Pages in various ways. Following criticism of Facebook in the context of fake news around the 2016 United States presidential election, Facebook recognized that Misplaced Pages already had an established process for fact-checking. Facebook's subsequent strategy for countering fake news included using content from Misplaced Pages for fact-checking. In 2020, Facebook began to include information from Misplaced Pages's info boxes in its own general reference knowledge panels to provide objective information.
Professional fact-checkers
Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg adapt an approach to fact checking as a type of media literacy, suggesting that information seekers emphasize lateral reading (or skimming multiple reliable sources instead of thoroughly examining one), including by using Misplaced Pages as a starting point for learning about a topic.
Renée DiResta in her 2024 book advised victims of rumors, misinformation or disinformation to ensure that factual information was available online, including on Misplaced Pages, especially in an era when AI chatbots often rely on Misplaced Pages for information.
Fact-checking Misplaced Pages
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Fact-checking is one aspect of the general editing process in Misplaced Pages. The volunteer community develops a process for reference and fact-checking through community groups such as WikiProject Reliability. Misplaced Pages has a reputation for cultivating a culture of fact-checking among its editors. Misplaced Pages's fact-checking process depends on the activity of its volunteer community of contributors, who numbered 200,000 as of 2018.
The development of fact-checking practices is ongoing in the Misplaced Pages editing community. One development that took years was the 2017 community decision to declare a particular news source, Daily Mail, as generally unreliable as a citation for verifying claims. Through strict guidelines on verifiability, Misplaced Pages has been combating misinformation. According to Misplaced Pages guidelines, all articles on Misplaced Pages's "mainspace" must be verifiable.
Self-contradiction articles
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A self-contradiction article is an article that contradicts itself.
An experiment was conducted on detecting self-contradiction articles on Misplaced Pages using a developed model called "Pairwise Contradiction Neural Network" (PCNN).
Contributions to this experiment are as follows:
- A novel Misplaced Pages dataset named WikiContradiction was created which is the first dataset for self-contradiction tasks on Misplaced Pages.
- A novel model PCNN was developed and was fine-tuned via the WikiContradiction dataset.
- The empirical results exhibit the PCNN model's promising performance as well as highlight the most contradicted pairs.
- The compiled WikiContradiction dataset can be used as a training resource for improving Misplaced Pages's articles.
- This can further contribute to fact-checking and claim verification as well.
Limitations
When Misplaced Pages experiences vandalism, platforms that reuse Misplaced Pages's content may republish that vandalized content. In 2016, journalists described how vandalism in Misplaced Pages undermines its use as a credible source.
Vandalism is prohibited by Misplaced Pages. The website suggests these steps for inexperienced beginners to handle vandalism: access, revert, warn, watch, and finally report.
In 2018, Facebook and YouTube were major users of Misplaced Pages for its fact-checking functions, but those commercial platforms were not contributing to Misplaced Pages's free nonprofit operations in any way.
Self-contradiction limitations: The two main limitations of the self-contradiction PCNN model are the subjectivity of self-contradiction and not being able to deal with lengthy documents.
See also
Notes
- A self-contradiction article contains at least one pair of two statements that contradict each other and are both presented as truth.
References
- ^ Timmons, Heather; Kozlowska, Hanna (April 27, 2018). "200,000 volunteers have become the fact checkers of the internet". Quartz.
- Hsu, Cheng; Li, Cheng-Te; Saez-Trumper, Diego; Hsu, Yi-Zhan (2021). "WikiContradiction: Detecting Self-Contradiction Articles on Misplaced Pages". 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). pp. 427–436. arXiv:2111.08543. doi:10.1109/BigData52589.2021.9671319. ISBN 978-1-6654-3902-2. S2CID 244130115.
- ^ Glaser, April (August 14, 2018). "YouTube Is Adding Fact-Check Links for Videos on Topics That Inspire Conspiracy Theories". Slate Magazine.
- ^ Flynn, Kerry (October 5, 2017). "Facebook outsources its fake news problem to Misplaced Pages—and an army of human moderators". Mashable.
- Benjakob, Omer (August 4, 2020). "Why Misplaced Pages is immune to coronavirus". Haaretz.
- ^ Iannucci, Rebecca (July 6, 2017). "What can fact-checkers learn from Misplaced Pages? We asked the boss of its nonprofit owner". Poynter Institute.
- Cox, Joseph (August 11, 2014). "Why People Trust Misplaced Pages More Than the News". Vice.
- ^ Zachary McDowell; Matthew A. Vetter (July 2020). "It Takes a Village to Combat a Fake News Army: Misplaced Pages's Community and Policies for Information Literacy". Social Media + Society. 6 (3): 205630512093730. doi:10.1177/2056305120937309. ISSN 2056-3051. Wikidata Q105083357.
- ^ Montgomery, Blake; Mac, Ryan; Warzel, Charlie (March 13, 2018). "YouTube Said It Will Link To Misplaced Pages Excerpts On Conspiracy Videos — But It Didn't Tell Misplaced Pages". BuzzFeed News.
- Feldman, Brian (March 16, 2018). "Why Misplaced Pages Works". Intelligencer. New York.
- Feldman, Brian (March 14, 2018). "Misplaced Pages Is Not Going to Save YouTube From Misinformation". Intelligencer. New York.
- Locker, Melissa (October 5, 2017). "Facebook thinks the answer to its fake news problems is Misplaced Pages". Fast Company.
- Perez, Sarah (June 11, 2020). "Facebook tests Misplaced Pages-powered information panels, similar to Google, in its search results". TechCrunch.
- Caulfield, Mike; Wineburg, Samuel S. (2023). Verified: how to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online. Chicago London: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-82984-5.
- DiResta, Renee (2024). "Part II Chapter 9". Invisible rulers: the people who turn lies into reality. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1-5417-0339-1.
- Keller, Jared (June 14, 2017). "How Misplaced Pages Is Cultivating an Army of Fact Checkers to Battle Fake News". Pacific Standard.
- Rodriguez, Ashley (February 10, 2017). "In a first, Misplaced Pages has deemed the Daily Mail too "unreliable" to be used as a citation". Quartz.
- ^ "Misplaced Pages:Verifiability", Misplaced Pages, April 18, 2022, retrieved April 19, 2022
- Hsu, Cheng; Li, Cheng-Te; Saez-Trumper, Diego; Hsu, Yi-Zhan (December 15, 2021). "WikiContradiction: Detecting Self-Contradiction Articles on Misplaced Pages". 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). Orlando, FL, USA: IEEE. pp. 427–436. arXiv:2111.08543. doi:10.1109/BigData52589.2021.9671319. ISBN 978-1-6654-3902-2. S2CID 244130115.
- ^ Funke, Daniel (June 18, 2018). "Misplaced Pages vandalism could thwart hoax-busting on Google, YouTube and Facebook". Poynter. Poynter Institute.
- A.E.S. (January 15, 2016). "Misplaced Pages celebrates its first 15 years". The Economist.
- "Misplaced Pages:Vandalism", Misplaced Pages, April 16, 2022, retrieved April 19, 2022
Further consideration
- Anker, Andrew; Su, Sara; Smith, Jeff (October 5, 2017). "New Test to Provide Context About Articles". About Facebook. Facebook, Inc.
- Mohan, Neal; Kyncl, Robert (July 9, 2018). "Building a better news experience on YouTube, together". blog.youtube. YouTube.
External links
- Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Reliability, the English Misplaced Pages community project which self-organizes fact-checking
