[EGreg]

Ok I will tell you.

We need a site like askpatents where each claims are hyperlinked to supporting evidence, with ONE forum for debating one side or the other, and voting the best arguments to the top. Then, news stories containing reputable claims would link to the site. Those articles that would spread fake news could have their claims autolinked to the page debunking it.

To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources. But the arguments would still be there. Ultimately how does science avoid such sabotage?

[RickS]

>To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources. But the arguments would still be there.

This doesn't seem like much of a hurdle. It basically describes what happens on reddit, with varying degrees of success. I know of no large social site that's solved this problem.

[mistermann]

I'd think the suggestion would be that each story would get one article. Reddit is a disorganized mish-mash of variations on a story, interfered with by biased moderators, and the "arguments" are rarely anything more than playground trash talk. To my knowledge, no one has made an attempt at making a truly as-objective-as-possible site for current events, I believe the idea has a lot of merit. Of course it wouldn't be perfect, but if it did get traction, I think it would improve things significantly.

I'm curious if anyone (who can see that Reddit is not what's being described) could point out flaws in the idea serious enough that it couldn't (as opposed to wouldn't) work.

[thebokehwokeh2]

> To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources.

Like what's happening in Reddit?

This is not too difficult to do.

The problem with fake news is anonymity. So long as it's possible to create tens of thousands of accounts without real world association to a human person, this problem, and all problems associated with trolling and brigading on the internet, will persist.

Anonymity is the best thing about the internet, and the worst thing about the internet.

[EGreg]

Look, reputation can be gamed. The end. How do you know anything you can't directly verify is true? Did Columbus and the egg actually happen? Did Galileo actually whisper something? Did Napoleon exist??

[lozenge]

So basically Wikipedia? Why do you think people will trust it and use it exclusively for information?

[EGreg]

Because people do that already with Wikipedia!

Boom.

[Bendingo]

What is true/accurate/complete and what is popular do not necessarily coincide.