Can truth be crowd-sourced?
Years ago, people urged caution about the use of Wikipedia in research, fact-checking, and source-citing.
Why?
For one thing, Wikipedia urged caution, but mainly because it was crowd-sourced information on an open source platform.
Anyone could become an editor. Anyone could contribute. Anyone could correct things.
That remains a cause for caution, but it is also a cause for confidence.
People have started to care, utilize, share, and depend upon Wikipedia and other open-source forums for a starting point of information gathering. Because they care and use the source, they also take the reliability of the information seriously.
Documentation of information is sometimes pages long, detailed, verifiable, and disputable.
The crowd keeps the forum honest and each individual reader is equipped to check out the sources and arrive at truth. It is a public trough of knowledge from which we can all drink. We just have to stay on our toes and participate.
This is where we are with news today - news, public information, policy data, statistics, and political claims. We drink from public troughs in which we can participate. We do not have to take one source at face value. We can check and double check.
The wisdom and knowledge of the crowd can question the motives behind the dissemination of disinformation. The crowd can be activated as brokers of truth. They can mine primary sources. They can verify. They can stake their own credibility. They can hold pundits, politicians, policy makers, power-brokers, and people in power accountable for what they say.
That is the greatest and most demanding job between elections - the in-your-face, relentless, and fearless pursuit and proclamation of truth.
It requires our participation as contributors and consumers.
If ever there was a time that necessitate our commitment to this task, it is now. We cannot allow anyone in the public eye with the public's ears to get by with any misrepresentation of truth. We must ruthlessly and skeptically evaluate even (and especially) data that supports our ideologies.
Check; double-check; check again; pass it on.
We will need to use existing platforms and perhaps, create new ones, but we must do this with commitment, energy, and consistency.
There are many who want to manipulate our minds. Only we can keep them free.
It is up to the crowd.
