International Fact Checking Day is April 2, 2017 — and we at Wiki Education have joined the initiative! We encourage you to participate by helping check facts on Wikipedia.
Participating is easy:
1. Log in to your Wikipedia account.
2. Go to the Citation Hunt tool. This will give you a sentence from a Wikipedia article with the dreaded “Citation Needed” tag.
3. Do some research to determine if the sentence in question is accurate according to sources.
4. If it is not accurate, click the “Edit” button on the section, delete the fact in question, and put in your edit summary, “Remove uncited claim I cannot find literature to support #FactCheckIt” — or edit the sentence to be true, and then follow step #5.
5. If it is accurate, find a source that meets Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources guidelines. Click the “edit” button on the section where the fact is listed, then click “Cite” and follow the directions to cite a source. Save the page. When you’re prompted to add an edit summary, say “Added citation #FactCheckIt”.
Adding the #FactCheckIt hashtag will enable us to track the impact of this initiative — so be sure to include it!
Feel free to repeat the steps to add more citations to facts. While we encourage you to participate specifically on April 2, facts can be updated any time, so don’t feel restricted to just participating then.
For more events related to International Fact Checking Day, visit http://factcheckingday.com/.
