“Can I trust my politician?” Linking fact checking to the Web
How the world of structured fact checking data can be connected to the ecosystem of Wikimedia.
By Andy Dudfield, Head of Full Fact AI, Full Fact
Full Fact’s new WikiCred project explores what happens when fact checks and interventions to the world are linked to Wikidata, and investigates how connecting the work of accredited fact checkers with information about politicians can help build indicators of credibility and trustworthiness in our democracies.
The world of fact checking
Fact checking is a relatively new discipline that involves taking an individual claim made by a person at a specific time and checking to see if it is correct. The fact checkers themselves are hardworking journalists doing a difficult job, needing to be both fast and thorough in what can be challenging circumstances. Fact checkers aren’t not magicians, either — they have no unique ability to be correct and trusted. Instead, fact checkers follow transparent processes that allow the reader of each check to see how a conclusion was reached, see the data and sources used to arrive at it and ultimately decide if they agree or not with the outcome.
The impact of fact checking can manifest in many ways, but it often comes from ensuring fact checks have a consequence. Fact checks are not just something published with a hope the world becomes instantly better informed, but rather the basis for action. At Full Fact, this means asking the person who made the incorrect statement to correct themselves, as well as using the fact checks we produce as evidence to campaign for changes to systems, behaviors and ultimately law and policy to create a better environment for good information.
How to make fact checks part of the web
To increase the utility of our work as fact checkers, we needed to better understand how the web works. For example, fact checking has a long and proud track record of working with structured data. The ClaimReview project has been running for a number of years and is likely the largest body of structured data anywhere in journalism. ClaimReview is part of the schema.org project that looks to codify an agreed standard way of describing things online. It means that we have a shared understanding of how to describe the opening times of your corner shop, the population of your country, how to get from A to B and within fact checking, how to describe a claim. This means we have greater consistency in the fact checking community and a common way of sharing this information with other platforms and services.
Internet platforms use ClaimReview to integrate fact checks into their products. The Full Fact team has long been interested in exploring how the world of structured fact checking data could connect to the ecosystem of Wikimedia. The challenge has been that the atomic unit of fact checking (the claim) has often not seemed to map to the wider world. Perhaps the very largest claims or urban myths might be worthy of a page, but the specificity of a claim and the knowledge of wikis did not connect well.
In the summer of 2022, Full Fact published a page on its website for each of the 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) that make up the United Kingdom’s House of Commons. These pages told users if an MP had been fact checked but also if they had made an incorrect statement, whether they had gone on to correct themselves in the future. Each of these pages was based on us giving that MP an ID. These were unique within our world, but are not globally unique.
The idea of these pages was to showcase the track record of these elected officials and help members of the public to answer a simple question: Can I trust this MP?
People, and especially MPs, are very likely to have a Wikipedia page. People, and especially MPs, are very likely to make claims that are worthy of fact checking.
Could this be the way to connect the worlds?
Enter WikiCred
This is what our new project will be exploring. More specifically, can Wikidata be used to act as a common backbone to ensure it is easy for humans and those accessing data programmatically to see a defined assertion that the person we are describing in our fact checks of MPs is the same person Wikidata is defining?
To do this, as part of our WikiCred project, Full Fact hopes to create a new property in Wikidata called “fullfact_id” (or something similar) and map between our world and it. Full Fact already uses Wikidata to connect some of our data behind the scenes but we know that not everyone we fact check will have (or deserve to have) a Wikidata ID. So, we need to also ensure we have our own way of uniquely identifying each person we check.
To try and make this easier for users we will also look at using something like a lookup URL to connect Wikidata URLs more obviously to Full Fact’s world in a browser.
Next Steps
Once these elements are in place, we will look to tell the world we have done so and work with interested parties to see what exciting new ways of using our work this project may unlock.
Full Fact is a team of fact checkers and campaigners fighting for a more accurate public debate in the UK. Over the last 12 years, we have written 1000s of fact checks and campaigned to improve the systems and processes that our fact checks fit within.
