Fact checking: Claims WikiTribune should verify

This WikiProject is dedicated to listing claims that could be fact checked by WikiTribune. This is an experimental process.

Possible claims for fact checking:

U.S. midterm elections

Add suggestions here or in TALK for empirical claims made by candidates in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections:

Other suggestions

• Fact check Rep. Duncan Hunter says congress made the Air Force invest in drones on Real Time with Bill Maher.
• “More than 800 scientific studies, the US EPA, the National Institutes of Health and regulators around the world have concluded that glyphosate is safe for use and does not cause cancer,” Monsanto VP Scott Partridge.
• Nancy Pelosi’s claim about Trump using U.S government resources to enrich ZTE company. 

Previous fact checks:

• Fact checking Carla Ortiz’s claims on White Helmets and Aleppo in the Syrian Civil War
• Fact checking public funding for Elon Musk ventures 
• Undocumented immigration into the U.S. from the southern border was at an all time high under Trump because of Mexican cartels. Cartels used this influx as a smokescreen. (Face the Nation). 
• Bernie Sanders’s claim that “over 40 percent of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense – 43 percent can’t afford the basics to live – Over 25 percent of adults skipped necessary medical care last year because they couldn’t afford it.”

WikiTribune’s fact checking guidelines – taken from this page

Choosing claims

• Choose empirically provable claims. If it’s not empirically provable, it isn’t fact-checking. To illustrate, we can check number of women in the U.S. Congress or the location of the school in Florida where the mass shooting took place, or if someone said a particular statement in a recorded and published speech, by contrast, we can’t check what the same person implied by his or her statement.
• Focus more on claims which have received attention such as viral news stories and tweets.

Laying out the page

• Cite the claim properly, always link to the source of the claim.
• When fact-checking quotes, or when attributing a claim to a person, always quote the person verbatim, in addition to having a link to the source of the claim.

Correction of errors

• WikiTribune is a wiki, meaning that mistakes will be made, but they can also be undone/fixed!
• If you see a mistake, first consider fixing it yourself.
• If you don’t feel comfortable fixing it yourself, let others know on the TALK page.

Role of community and editors

• Community is at the heart of WT fact-checking. This is a collaborative effort by the group.
• If there is a dispute, remember to seek consensus on the TALK page before making big changes
• Trusted users and staff administrators may at times be called upon to judge the veracity of a claim, or to judge community consensus. (This is similar to the role of administrators in Wikipedia RfCs.)

Time spent on each fact checking report

• The current goal is to spend 10-14 days on each fact-checking report, marked clearly at the top of the page.

This is an evolving document

• As a wiki, nothing is ever done! This is the first draft of the fact-checking guidelines, but please, be bold, if you see something wrong, change something!