i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Just heard about this project, the total scope of which seems outside of 202 (but is still fascincating): the MediaBugs project (http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/11/how-do-we-categorize-all-journalistic...) hopes to be a fact- and system-checking process similar to bug tracking in software development.

The most 202-ish aspect of this is their call for help in categorization:

"Individual news organizations sometimes track their own errors internally, but, as far as we've been able to determine, there is no common, industry-wide nomenclature for categorizing those errors -- no Library of Congress classification or Dublin Core metadata standard."

Sounds like things we've learned about tagging and controlled vocab could be of application here... .

Media and news junkies like myself will jump at this, but I'd encourage people who aren't (that is, "normal people") to go take a look and think about how to contribute. Insiders might reinforce assumptions that outsiders might, and rightly, challenge.