Introducing Factopolis

Factopolis
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

You may have noticed already, but politicians don’t always tell the truth. Sites like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org provide desperately needed fact-checking of these claims, but we quickly forget all but the most egregious of lies after a 24-hour news cycle or two.

Factopolis is a new non-partisan project which aims to create a comprehensive, collaboratively-edited database of the lies politicians tell, as well as tools to help explore that data.

We look at articles written by fact checkers, extract the important information, and load it into our database. If a claim is repeated, either by the same politician or some other prominent figure, we’ll add that, too. Then we present it in a way which makes it easy to see the connections.

For an example of what we’re trying to do, check out Donald Trump’s page.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Factopolis is that the data is available completely free in machine-readable formats, meaning anyone can use it to create anything they can imagine, including (and especially) things we haven’t thought of!

Alas, it turns out politicians lie a lot (who knew?), which means there is a lot of data to go through to build our database, which is where you come in. If you have a few minutes to spare, please consider helping. We need people to help gather information about both new claims being made as well as historical information. Gathering data is absolutely vital, and it doesn’t require any special expertise, so if you’re interested in helping it’s a great place to start!

For those with technical expertise, we’re happy to accept any help you can provide; we’re in particular need of a good designer, but if you’re interested in things like data visualization and/or front-end programming, or anything else you think would be a good addition to the site we’d love to hear from you!

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