There is a role for crowdsourcing in factchecking but (so far) it’s not factchecking
In Summary
In the current climate of information overload the demand for factchecking is increasing. Factcheckers are often small teams that struggle to keep up with the demand. In recent years, new organisations like WikiTribune have suggested crowdsourcing as an attractive and low-cost way for factchecking to scale.
Here’s my take. There are three components to crowdsourcing that you are trading off:
- Speed: how quickly the task can be done.
- Complexity: how difficult the task is to perform. The more complex the more oversight needed.
- Coverage: the number of topics or areas you can cover.
These exist in a trade-off triangle, so…
Last week the money donated by strangers on the internet helped deliver 210 blankets and 175kg of rice to Arbat Refugee camp, Iraq.
In July, I started a crowdfunding campaign to raise £500 to feed the displaced families in a refugee camp just outside my hometown in Iraq. Within 8 hours we had not only reached my target, we had doubled it. By the end of the 14 days, 48 of us had come together and raised £1,681.
There are about 6,000 people housed in Arbat, a permanent refugee camp just outside of Sulaymaniyah. You can read about it here…
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I want to share with you some of the difficulties (all 8 of them) that have killed my momentum dead in its tracks. …
