Imprecise machines mess with history by Kaiser Fung.
From the post:
The mass media continues to gloss over the imprecision of machines/algorithms.
Here is another example I came across the other day. In conversation, the name Martin Van Buren popped up. I was curious about this eighth President of the United States.
What caught my eye in the following Google search result (right panel) is his height:
See Kaiser’s post for an amusing error on U.S. Presidents which has been echoed in U.S. classrooms without a doubt.
Kaiser asks how to make fact-checking machines possible?
I’m not sure we need fact-checking machines as much as we need several canonical sources of information on the WWW.
At one time, there were several world almanacs in print (may still be) and for most routine information, those were authoritative sources.
I don’t know that search engines need fact checkers so much as they need to be less promiscuous. At least in terms of the content that they repeat as fact.
There is a difference between “facts” you index at the New York Times and some local historical society.
The source of data was important before the WWW and it continues to be important today.