Wikifact/Technical

User interface and user experience

Content selection and context menus

As envisioned, end-users could simply select portions of documents, e.g., statements, in Web browsers or word processing software with these selections potentially containing hypertext, mathematics, and multimedia.

End-users could open context menus upon selections of content, e.g., by right-clicking. Context menus could provide items for end-users which invoke first-, second-, or third-party services (such as Wikifact) with selected content.

Web browsers would open and present content provided by invoked services in new tabs.

Paginated search results

It may be the case, after selecting to invoke Wikifact in a context menu, that an end-user is next presented, in a new tab, with a paginated view of search results to which their selection of content may resolve.

It may be the case, instead, that an end-user would next be routed to a best guess with respect to their selection of content and also presented with a navigation option to visit a paginated view of options.

Incremental search

Another UI/UX concept is that of incremental search, where end-users could enter statements into search textboxes, incrementally, and receive options, as they type, in search suggest drop-down lists.

The received options or recommendations would be more elaborated and more contextually specified.

Embedding fact-checking article summaries

As envisioned, end-users would be able to embed and showcase fact-checked statements on their websites, resembling how Twitter tweets can be embedded. End-users could showcase their contributions to Wikifact, showcase content relevant to their website articles, or showcase Wikifact content on their websites for any other reason.

Real-time usage data and analytics

Real-time aggregate usage data, e.g., recently popular fact-checking requests, could be made available to the Wikifact community so that interested editors could make use of this data to better contribute. Wikifact could have a community dashboard for real-time usage data and analytics.

Real-time aggregate usage data and analytics could be of use for providing best guesses which route end-users to articles based on their selections of content.

Change propagation and notifications

Templates

Editors could make use of templates to import statements from Wikifact into their Wikinews, Wikipedia, and Wikisource articles.

Change propagation

Whenever statements were updated on Wikifact, those editors interested in dependent Wikinews, Wikipedia, or Wikisource articles could be notified so as to be able to revisit the articles and/or to contribute on Wikifact.

Notifications

End-users, e.g., those who visit a new page before substantial fact-checking occurs, can also add Wikifact articles to their watchlists, e.g., receiving notifications as any subsequent fact-checking occurs.

Editors might opt to receive individual email alerts, or to receive digests, automatically-generated newsletters, which contain changes or updates relevant to their interests. Editors could also opt to review dynamic, personalized, automatically-generated pages of updates when they login to or visit Wikinews, Wikipedia, or Wikisource.

Wikifact alerts and notifications could be interoperable with the Echo notifications system and communication channels, in addition to or instead of email (e.g. instant messaging applications, collaboration, and productivity software), could also be opted into for Wikifact-related alerts and notifications.

Administration

Article protection

In some circumstances, articles may need to be protected from modification by certain groups of editors. Protection is a technical restriction applied only by administrators, although any user may request protection. Protection can be indefinite or expire after a specified time. The various levels of protection are detailed here.

For statement-centric resources like Wikifact, consideration should be given to ensuring the convenience of protecting individual articles and collections of articles through administrative dashboards.

Annotation

Selectors

Models of annotation include the W3C Web Annotation Data Model. This annotation data model includes a sophisticated means of describing portions of, e.g., selections of, documents, the selector model.

Interpretation

One can view ascribing Boolean or other truth values to statements, claims, or facts as a form of annotation.

Fact-checking

Annotations utilized by fact-checkers include, but are not limited to: “true”, “mostly true”, “half true”, “partially true”, “mostly false”, “false”, “disputed”, “misleading”, “contains omissions”, “contains exaggerations”, “contains distortions”, “contains hearsay”, and so forth.

Schema.org’s ClaimReview presently annotates statements with numerical values from an interval, e.g. x out of N units.

Perhaps fact-checking annotations could be categorized. One approach for such categorization includes the use of informational messages, warnings, and errors. Benefits of such approaches would include that annotations could be easily integrated, merged together, from multiple sources or service providers and that annotations could be easily organized and viewed by end-users.

Multiple statements

Annotations could annotate multiple passages of text from one or more documents.

Visualization

It is possible that, using the W3C Web Annotations data model and protocol, end-users could toggle to visualize selections of content in their documents that are statements with articles available on Wikifact.

Epistemology

Indeterminacy

Unannotated statements, claims, or facts can be described as being “indeterminate”.

Paraconsistency

It may occur that annotations on Wikifact are paraconsistent. Some statements may be disputed, annotated, by some parties, as “true”, and by other parties, as “false”. In an annotational approach, statements could be annotated as being “disputed” without paradox or error.

Quotations and attestations

Quotations and attestations are useful to consider for Wikifact.

Schema.org’s quotation and Wikidata’s quotation could be of use.

Citations and references

Annotations of statements, claims, or facts could cite and quote from referenced materials.

Justification

Different theories of justification require different conditions before a belief can be considered justified. Theories of justification generally include other aspects of epistemology, such as knowledge.

There are several different views as to what entails justification. Notable theories of justification include:

Foundationalism – Basic beliefs justify other, non-basic beliefs.
Epistemic coherentism – Beliefs are justified if they cohere with other beliefs a person holds, each belief is justified if it coheres with the overall system of beliefs.
Infinitism – Beliefs are justified by infinite chains of reasons.
Foundherentism – A combination of foundationalism and epistemic coherentism, proposed by Susan Haack
Internalism – The believer must be able to justify a belief through internal knowledge.
Externalism – Outside sources of knowledge can be used to justify a belief.
Reformed epistemology – Beliefs are warranted by proper cognitive function, proposed by Alvin Plantinga.
Epistemic skepticism – A variety of viewpoints questioning the possibility of knowledge
Evidentialism – Beliefs depend solely on the evidence for them.
Reliabilism - A belief is justified if it is the result of a reliable process.

Scientific models and theories

In particular if Wikifact is desired to facilitate scenarios for the sciences, we might want to consider scientific models and theories when formalizing schemas for statements.

Linguistics

Grammar

Individual statements can be described as having grammatical properties, such as tense and aspect.

Paraphrases

Clustering

Each statement, claim, or fact could have a URL, for instance https://www.wikifact.org/statements/33DCF305-3A4D-4024-9AD7-CCB1A29054E2, and each paraphrase cluster could have a URL, for instance https://www.wikifact.org/clusters/D006871E-24A6-428F-BD1F-D20C3C7B7685. The URL for an individual statement, claim, or fact could redirect to a URL for the paraphrase cluster which contains it. This could convenience processes of semi-automated, collaborative paraphrasing; that is, in the event of an erroneous paraphrasing, editors or software tools could edit a redirect page to re-cluster an individual statement to an updated cluster of paraphrases. At the URL for a paraphrase cluster would be a human-editable sequence of annotations and arguments.

Statement patterns

Statement patterns could be expressed and these patterns could be utilized via URL query strings. Nouns or noun phrases could be provided as arguments. That is, arguments for thematic relations could be provided utilizing Wikidata lexemes and entities. For example, https://www.wikifact.org/patterns/293FCD5D-27A7-498A-81C3-C78EF0F9D9A2?agent=Q42&patient=Q89 could represent a set of statements expressing that “Douglas Adams ate an apple.”

Contexts

With respect to schemas for statements, claims, or facts, schemas defining the structure of and relationships between them, one can consider that statements, claims, or facts could reference, or otherwise be attached to, their linguistic contexts. Linguistic contexts could be paragraphs, passages of text, or entire documents. Referencing the contexts of statements, claims, or facts could be useful for natural language processing, anaphora resolution, natural language understanding, and machine-learning algorithms.

Conveniently, for wiki-based content, snapshots of articles can be referenced by URL’s, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Context_(language_use)&oldid=983879664, and, for other domains, one could use a Web archive.

Ontologies and schemas

Statements

As envisioned, in a statement-centric resource, content in articles about statements would include, but not be limited to: proofs, arguments, justifications, and fact-checking-related information.

Collections of statements

Statements could be placed into collections.

One type of collection is one where only one statement in the collection can be logically true, where the elements are mutually exclusive.

Another type of collection is one where only the latest statement in the collection is intended to be true, one where the latest statement supersedes previous statements.

Another type of collection could be called a “timeline”, “thread”, or “story”. Whenever a new statement were added to such a collection, each previous element could be pinged as a result, notifying interested editors.

Another type of collection is statements about the same subject.

Another type of collection would be ad-hoc collections such as those statements co-occurring in documents, articles, reports, or political speeches.

Folksonomy

Statements and collections of statements could have folksonomic keywords, categories, or hashtags as properties.

Indexing, search, and retrieval

Statements could be indexed for search and retrieval in a number of ways, e.g., the subjects that a statement is about.

Querying

End-users could query Wikifact (or Wikidata) to import libraries of statements about a topic, which might include connections to the latest analyses or derivatives of those statements.

Wikidata

With ontologies and schemas which define the properties of and relationships between statements and collections of statements, Wikifact could utilize Wikidata as a backend.

Artificial intelligence

Automatic content generation

It may be the case that, for a resource like Wikifact, articles could be generated automatically and be subsequently available for editing by editors. Tools like Project Debater could be of use for automatically generating content about statements.

Automated fact-checking

Guo, Zhijiang, Michael Schlichtkrull, and Andreas Vlachos. "A survey on automated fact-checking." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 10 (2022): 178-206.
Nakov, Preslav, David Corney, Maram Hasanain, Firoj Alam, Tamer Elsayed, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Paolo Papotti, Shaden Shaar, and Giovanni Da San Martino. "Automated fact-checking for assisting human fact-checkers." arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.07769 (2021).
Sathe, Aalok, Salar Ather, Tuan Manh Le, Nathan Perry, and Joonsuk Park. "Automated fact-checking of claims from Wikipedia." In Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pp. 6874-6882. 2020.
Piktus, Aleksandra, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Dmytro Okhonko, Samuel Broscheit, Gautier Izacard, Patrick Lewis, et al. "The Web Is Your Oyster -- Knowledge-Intensive NLP against a Very Large Web Corpus." arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.09924 (2021).

Technical questions

A list of technical questions is available here.