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 This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. If it falls this year (2024), then I may stop the whole blogging thing, but that's all a "wait and see" scenario. An index of topics can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. |
| Fact-checking Schnujo NEEDS to do homework has reached out with another question – she wants to know about fact-checking, especially with facts changing. No matter what sort of non-fiction you write, research is vital. And, in this day and age, really, stupidly difficult. The Internet might be a liberating force and makes life easier (allegedly) in so many ways, but when it comes to research… Yikes! Yes, the Internet has long made research hard. Sort of. Here’s research basics, by the way: "20240712 Contemporary Research For Writers" .Basically, in my opinion, research should not have changed from the way we did it in the 1980s. But people think going back like that is “hard.” It is time-consuming, but I cannot see it being harder than the system that has been foisted upon us now. However, it should not be so hard that the Director of Health in the USA (RFK Jr) feels the need to tell blatant falsehoods, misrepresent data, and make up references. That is just a combination of laziness, stupidity and sheer bloody-mindedness. Online I am going to start with researching online. GOOD 1. Peer-reviewed papers. While you have access to research papers which have been peer-reviewed in a much easier manner than having to go to various universities hoping they have the journal you need, you do need to pay for access (sometimes a lot) or, like me, be a permanent student. That is easier for people like me, yes, but not for the general public. Peer-reviewed papers, where the reviews support the paper (and not every peer review is supportive; there is a paper often cited by a particular group as being peer-reviewed, but the reviews were negative, so be careful) are the best place to find information. And there are journals for nearly everything! So, if you have access, first point of call. 2. dot-gov. Sites marked “.gov” are supposed to be trustworthy places for governmental information, including geography, government, laws, etc. Some governments have a lot of oversight over their websites, but generally the “.gov” sites of the USA, Australia, Canada, UK are very separate from the politics of the ruling government of the day. That is an easy access and readily available site. I did say USA there, but at the moment that is even not the case, so you need to be aware of political changes. Also “.gov” sites do not cover everything. 3. Encyclopaedias. Then we have online encyclopaedias. Brittanica.com is generally regarded as the best online encyclopaedia, but that is because it maintains the paper version’s format and style. Basic info presented for people to use to begin further research, with citations and references. If you understand German, apparently the German equivalent is also very good. 4. Trove. Trove is the Australian online trove of digitised old newspapers with a good search option. Just newspapers scanned in and there to use for free. I know there is a similar set-up in the UK. There is a great US one at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. Most others require payment. Three things, however – searching can be difficult because the scanning can obscure the words to not make for an easy search. Two, journalistic truth is a thing that can be suspect. It is not good nowadays, where biases abound in the reporting of news; in the old days, they would make stuff up to fill in the gaps. And third, opinion was often reported as actual news, not an op-ed piece. So you do need to be careful. But, in general, a great resource. 5. Public media. This is the media owned and financed (but not operated) by the government. The ABC in Australia (there is some left bias, but that has diminished markedly, and is not as bad as the right bias in any other Australian media), the BBC in the UK (some royalist bias), and PBS in the USA (depending on their funding). Still, for media sites, these three are by far the best when it comes to accuracy of information. MEDIOCRE 1. Wikipedia. Wikipedia is good only for the footnotes. As an information source, it does tend towards being rubbish. Like all user-curated sites, because it is written and edited by people who think they know, the information should not ever be taken at face value. And, doing some research for my monster book, I discovered some of the footnotes are made up and the references do not exist. It’s not like I am looking for obscure stuff, but Wikipedia’s “vetting” process has allowed falsehoods in. Literally anyone with an Internet connection (who has not been previously banned) can edit or write for Wikipedia; it is a communal pit of some good stuff and some made-up stuff and a lot of opinion stuff. Not a great resource in and of itself, and hardly a usable resource. It is banned as a university reference in Australia. 2. dot-org. The “.org” suffix indicates the site is run by a registered organisation, including charities, but excluding businesses. The thing is, they all have a barrow to push, so their bias is right there in their established name and statement of organisation. However, because a lot of charities are run through them, blatant falsehoods (especially in Australia and the UK) can see them lose that “.org” suffix and so taxes would apply. Be wary, and find other sources, but they can be a good place to start. 3. Interviews with experts/ witnesses. Why is this in mediocre? Ask a police officer. If you have three witnesses to a crime, you will get three different versions of events, even though they all saw the same thing and are sure they are telling it perfectly. Experts are often a good source, but even they will not know everything and might make suppositions on areas they do not know based on what they do know, they might have biases, or they might just be at the far end of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and be unsure of their own knowledge. But an expert or someone who was actually there is always going to be better than hearing it second or third hand. 4. General websites. Sure, general interest to narrow interest websites are great resources. However, unless they have included their own research sources, trusting them can be fraught with danger. Is that information they have found, information they half-remember, something they were told, something they saw on Facebook, or something they made up? And how do you know? Further, some websites go out of date if they are not upkept. A great example is the old dinosaurs.com. It is now an “untrustworthy site” because of viruses and bugs, but it was last updated in 2007, before the latest information on feathering was really established. Great site, but out of date based on new discoveries. Less trustworthy than a “.org” but still a good starting place. BAD 1. Social media. People make stuff up, put forth conspiracy theories, use anecdotes as evidence, everything on social media. And they misrepresent themselves all the time. Problem is, people see it, believe it, then put it forth as the truth. Completely useless. And memes mean nothing. 2. Blogs/ Vlogs. This is a website or video site where a person simply writes/ talks about their own opinions and life. Different to social media in that it is intended to be personal, but with all the same pitfalls. 3. Private media. This is media owned by one person or a corporation. Their biases affect the “facts” they put forth. 4. Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is a programme that learns. Here is the problem with AI – it learns from the Internet. Not just places which are good sources, but social media. In fact, for a long while the only site that allowed AI to scrape it was Reddit, so AI was telling people blatant falsehoods. When Grammarly was first released, it was just a form of MS Word’s F7 spell/grammar check with a function that allowed for summarisation. However, now it is based on AI and is learning from the Internet, it makes more and more mistakes to the point that it is useless. tl;dr Finding actual hard information on the Internet is very hit or miss, and separating the wheat from the chaff – fact-checking –is like looking for a needle in a haystack. (Metaphor mixing is my super-power.) The upsurge in user-curated platforms, like the sheer volume of wikis, ancestry.com and social media, means facts are buried under crap. User-curated sites are generally not good, and they are what the online world is being filled with… Offline Let’s move to offline research. In this case I am not going to go good, mediocre, bad because they are all these things all at once! 1. Books. Books are, of course, a great resource. Especially in the “old days”, publishing was expensive, so we did not see the plethora of self-published books we do now, and because of laws regarding dissemination of information, the publishers had to ensure that the information was accurate, or as accurate as possible. However, those information laws are no longer in existence, and with self-publishing so cheap (comparatively), anybody can print a book about anything. Unfortunately, too many modern books use the Internet as a referencing source, and so it does cast their information in a dubious light. So, what to do? It’s easy, actually. Utilise books from the twentieth century. Not all are perfect (the 90s saw a lot of opinion as fact tomes start to appear as creative non-fiction started to take hold), but more often than not, they are more useful than the Internet. This will require reading, and will require not being able to use the “search” function (e-books excluded) but the index, but I have found when researching my book that it is better to be safe than sorry. Do not dismiss sites like Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, et al. either for electronic books and scanned items that are much older. Sort of like the best of both worlds. 2. Letters. If you want information about a time period, reading letters sent by those alive at the time probably give the best impression of life. Yes, they will be biased, maybe ill-informed in some areas, but their observations are coming from real people. Letters from soldiers give a much more impressive and personal history of war than a textbook, for example. It is not a source of undeniable truth, but these perceptions can help colour a non-fiction work. 3. Newspapers. Everything I said about Trove is here, only there is more bias in many of today’s papers. Of course, reading the old papers yet to be digitised is just Trove the long way around. 4. Word of mouth/anecdotes. This is often a good start, but should never be taken as gospel. People’s memories are fallible, they change over time and over telling, and they could be born of mis-perception. Documentaries I have put documentaries separate as they exist in all spaces, on and offline. And I include podcasts here as well. Documentaries tend towards a bias the film-maker wants to put forth. They might not lie outright – and most documentaries made pre-Internet were pretty good in this regard – but they will pick and choose the information to support their arguments, maybe show footage out of order, maybe look at the past through a modern eye. Again, they can be a great start, but they should not be taken as the be-all and end-all. However, two things have made modern documentaries – say the past 10 years or so – more untrustworthy. The first is the “mockumentary”, where a fake documentary is created. The Last Dragon and Mermaids: The Body Found are the two most notorious examples. Though they were admitted to being fake after the fact, there are many others out there that could well be following their footsteps. The second is the use of deep-fakes, AI created visuals and CGI created films, then all of this is put forth as real. Computers have destroyed trust in what we see in the documentary format. Dunning-Kruger Effect I mentioned in passing the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and this is something that needs to be considered when looking at sources, especially from so-called experts who blog/vlog or appear as talking heads on shows. What this effect states basically is this: a person with a little or surface level knowledge of a topic tends to over-estimate how much they know and are confident in espousing that information; a person with some knowledge realises there is so much more to learn, and think they will never get there; an expert knows there is still more to learn and understands they will never know everything, so while they speak with some confidence, are never completely sure. They will also back up their statements with evidence. The rule of thumb is if someone acts like they know everything, they tend to know next to nothing.  So, in general, fact-checking is really hard. It will take a lot of work to ensure the truth. But it is worth it. |
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