How to make the "truth meter" follow the politician around

Spencer Critchley — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:07:19 -0400

Great idea, but I'd like to see a system that follows you around (the way a reputation does in oral cultures), so there's less cover provided by the fact that the ratings are tied to particular locations on the web, which most people probably wouldn't end up visiting.

I recently wrote on O'Reilly ONLamp about an idea to color-code politicians' names, potentially anywhere they appeared, based on truthfulness (as determined by searching factcheck.org):

It's based partly on University of California Santa Cruz researcher Luca De Alfaro's Wikipedia trust-coloring project.

PolitiFact

mattwaite — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:22:35 -0400

Thanks for writing about PolitiFact. We're really excited about the possibilities and are proud of the site. Just to clarify something: I designed and built the site's architecture, but I'm not running it. The hard work is being headed up by Bill Adair, the St. Petersburg Times' Washington Bureau Chief, who deserves all the credit for the original idea. Where we've put our resources -- into researching and reporting out the statements -- is where we have resources. The Times and Congressional Quarterly have some of the best reporters and researchers around (you can see the whole staff here). PolitiFact takes those resources and puts them to work in a form and format that I think works on the web far better than, as you wrote, reposting print material. Where we're thin on resources is on the administrative end, with the people needed to make participation work. Fact checking politicians and writing about it is an old newspaper story -- we know how to do that. But doing it this way is all new to us. Stay tuned. We've got more to come.

Matt Waite
St. Petersburg Times
PolitiFact.com | mattwaite.com

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How to make the "truth meter" follow the politician around

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