Trust but verify: Or why without references, no one can know anything

According to a study done by Bloomberg, eight out of 10 small businesses will fail within the first 18 months.

But that claim doesn’t exist, and, we learn from the blog to which this essay is a reply, the number is more like 40–50%.

To quote from the 8 out of 10 article:

Statistics can easily be doctored, made up out of thin air, or even serve as reference articles in massive business publications that didn’t thoroughly fact-check. This isn’t a slam against xxxx (who I write for sometimes) — it’s a slam against the way news happens now.

The issue is news that uses inituitively-attractive phrases linked to authoritative names, and fails to substantiate the underlying claim.

Anyone involved in factual writing knows that there’s just one solution to this: making verifiable citations normal practice.

Wikipedia, for instance, made a massive constitutional decision, one which goes a long way to assuring quality in its articles: Their Verifiability policy requires inline citations for any material challenged or likely to be challenged, and for all quotations, anywhere in article space.

Medium, the master of clean fluid generation, currently lacks the ability to easily and cleanly include references and footnotes. I think that’s a major flaw. It leads us to include in-line links (subject to link rot), and in general doesn’t allow reader’s to verify claims for themselves.

Two things that would help greatly would be generating a doi for each Medium article, and enabling the generation of inline reference sections from a simple and user-friendly citation generator.

The next time anyone quotes a random statistic at me, I’m answering with, “Show me the citation” And to medium “Show me the easy citation system” :-)

PS: An example of good practice is arstechnica, who routinely include doi links in their factual reportage.