“Can I trust my elected politicians or candidates?” is the key question facing voters at election time. Trust in politics is built through small, repeated acts of building credibility and is central to countering election misinformation. Independent, impartial fact checking organisations across the world hold crucial data on the behaviour of politicians, including not only the claims they make but also whether they correct mistakes and false claims. Trustworthiness is earned in the moments when someone is found to have got something wrong, and how they choose to act next. We want the information we produce as fact checkers to be as useful to other people as possible. We want to share the data we produce around politicians and political behaviour, including the claims they have made and if they have corrected themselves, and explicitly assert where the identifiers we use can be directly connected to existing ones that exist within wikimedia, especially wikidata.
| Can I trust my politician? | |
|---|---|
| A WikiCred 2022 Grant Proposal | |
| Project Type | Technology |
| Author | () |
| Contact | louisa.johnson@fullfact.org |
| Requested amount | $7,000 |
| Award amount | Unknown |
- What is your idea?
For example, the 1181 in our ‘Can I trust’ URL refers to the same person as Q6383803 in wikidata.
https://fullfact.org/can-i-trust/1181/keir-starmer/
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6383803
We want to make it easier to connect politicians with their track record of claims and corrections.
- Why is it important?
We want to build a web focused on common identifiers and allow people to bridge between domains easily. We would like to explore using wikidata as the babel fish to connect our work effectively to other projects and ensure as many people can discover it and trust our work. In doing so, we hope it will help them better understand and place trust in politicians.
- Link(s) to your resume or anything else (CV, GitHub, etc.) that may be relevant
- Is your project already in progress?
We have the pages on our site showing the track record of politicians in the UK and we are looking at how to make them as effective as possible.
- How is this project relevant to credibility and Wikipedia?
The work of fact checkers is often focused on individual claims, which are hard to model in a way that allows easy translation to the Wikipedia world. We are looking to test if by specifically asserting that, as fact checkers, we think these people made these claims (both correctly and incorrectly) we can offer an additional collection of high quality information to the Wikimedia ecosystem.
- What is the ultimate impact of this project?
More people are able to discover our content via Wikimedia and people develop a greater trust in politicians.
- Can your project scale?
Yes. We are focused in the UK, but work internationally and are interested in exploring how a project like this can be a starting point for more effectively bridging fact checking and wiki worlds globally.
- Why are you the people to do it?
We are one of the few fact checkers in the world with an in-house technical team and we have a deep understanding of the web, standards and open data with a track record of working in this space for the last 10 years.
- What is the impact of your idea on diversity and inclusiveness of the Wikimedia movement?
Our work will provide an independent voice showing a neutral view of the claims made by politicians. By our very design we are a non political organisation and are able to provide impartial information in a space that needs it most.
- What are the challenges associated with this project and how you will overcome them?
If the link between the domains works well, we will need to think about what a machine readable view of the pages would look like and how to provide this as scale to those requesting the information.
- How will you spend your funds?
These costs will cover time spent by Full Fact’s Head of Automated Fact Checking and Web Developer establishing common identifiers between our existing pages and existing Wikipedia pages, and creating links between the two, as well as time spent analysing the results of the project and its replicability.
- How long will your project take?
3-4 months
- Have you worked on projects for previous grants before?
Yes, we have a history of delivering grant funded projects focused on technological innovations for fact checking and misinformation for Google.org, Meta, Luminate, Open Society Foundations and Vodafone Foundation.