Maybe these were not well organized enough or didn’t reach a critical mass.
How were they not well-organized? Why do you think this sort of phenomenon has any sort of ‘critical mass’ effect to it? And why would any future effort not be doomed to fail to reach the critical mass just like all the past ones obviously?
These are specialized in pointing out very grave errors in doctoral thesis—esp. plagiarism and so can and do have significant consequences for the subject under scrutinity.
If that’s the best you can point to, that does not fill me with hope. When are political questions ever as clear as copy-paste plagiarization? That is not a success story, that’s something that fills me with horror—things are even worse than I thought:
Most of these revocations have held up in court. However, some universities disagreed with VroniPlag finding, even in cases of blatant plagiarism (between 40 and 70% of pages affected with plagiarism). The correct methods for dealing with plagiarism – and its prevention – remains an ongoing discussion in Germany.
And you hope factchecking can make a difference in real politics?!
Well. Politics is the mind-killer. Surely such a fact-checking site would be prone to all the hacks politics can master to ″limit″ its effect. Wikipedia and Vroniplag are good (real: illustrative) examples of this.
Whether I have ″hope″? My post wasn’t about hope but intended to point out structures with ‘critical mass’ that did have an effect. One can learn from that. How to build on these, tweak their logic to maybe achieve a better result.
A critical mass is in my opinion always needed to have any noticable effect because local uncoordinated effects are dealt with by self-stabilizing effects of the existing norms (politic powers can use e.g. regression toward the mean, coordinated salami tactics, fogging and noise).
How were they not well-organized? Why do you think this sort of phenomenon has any sort of ‘critical mass’ effect to it? And why would any future effort not be doomed to fail to reach the critical mass just like all the past ones obviously?
If that’s the best you can point to, that does not fill me with hope. When are political questions ever as clear as copy-paste plagiarization? That is not a success story, that’s something that fills me with horror—things are even worse than I thought:
And you hope factchecking can make a difference in real politics?!
Well. Politics is the mind-killer. Surely such a fact-checking site would be prone to all the hacks politics can master to ″limit″ its effect. Wikipedia and Vroniplag are good (real: illustrative) examples of this.
Whether I have ″hope″? My post wasn’t about hope but intended to point out structures with ‘critical mass’ that did have an effect. One can learn from that. How to build on these, tweak their logic to maybe achieve a better result.
A critical mass is in my opinion always needed to have any noticable effect because local uncoordinated effects are dealt with by self-stabilizing effects of the existing norms (politic powers can use e.g. regression toward the mean, coordinated salami tactics, fogging and noise).
Not to mention the fact-checkers themselves are subject to being mind-killed.