The clever folks at Center for American Progress have just launched Claims vs. Facts, a collaborative database that logs the lies of the lying liars on the right, and matches each lie against the documented facts.
What’s really neat about this is that you can submit lies and facts to the database, subject to fact-checking (duh!) by the CAP editorial team.
This is a great example of how the Internet can be used to compile valuable knowledge from many individual authors. Activists groups need to take a lesson from this, and think more about how we can tap the knowledge and expertise in our communities, using the Internet as a “listening tool.”
Very cool idea. Would be a lot better if they dropped the search based interface in favor of something browsable. Slapping a search interface on things is the lazy way out.
For a project like this to really take off you would want it to be able to find the most recently added items, the most recently relevant items (they told that damn lie again!), it should have its own, snappy domain name (sub-domain, ala truth.americanprogress.org would be fine, though a trifle long), and, most importantly, each item in the database needs its own permalink. Otherwise they aren’t linkable (and therefore not useful) to the web dialogue.