Fact Checking

Fact Checking

The Idea

The Internet is a primary source of news and information today, though unlike established media the Internet lacks traditional fact-checking mechanisms. But does the Internet really need traditional fact-checking? Fact-checking general information on the Internet is an abstract and decentralized but relatively straightforward undertaking. Broad classes of falsifiable information, like health advice, superstitions, product marketing and history, have entire websites dedicated to their confirmation or refutation: WebMD, Snopes.com, Amazon Reviews and Wikipedia. Each of these websites has mechanisms to cite sources of information, vote on the credibility of information and solve domain specific problems to each class. Undoubtedly, there is still a tremendous amount of false and inaccurate information on the Internet, but sites like Snopes and Wikipedia do a sufficiently good job of establishing what is true and false that we chose to focus on a slightly element: sourcing Internet information.

To help readers better understand where the information they read in online sources comes from, we propose to develop a design a sort of Turnitin.com for the Internet. Turnitin.com is an online service that analyzes student work for plagiarism by comparing the submitted work to a database of other work and Internet sources. Turnitin generates "originality reports" for each submitted document (sample shown below)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/Turnitin_sample_report.png