Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Aerroon on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:35AM (#23897648)

>I'd hate to just see a URI and go "OK, I am convinced ty" and automatically pick up the pitchforks against those without.

Something to particularly consider are circular references. If you make the reference graph large enough then it's easy to fool people into thinking that there is a valid source for a claim when there actually isn't one. All you have are references that refer to one another. It gets particularly bad when some of those references end up as dead links, because then you can't even find out whether the chain ended up at a valid source or not.

Related to this are long reference chains that end up on a shaky source. A poorly done study (or simply a bought one) can end up being referenced in a long chain. The links in the chain might end up giving more credibility to the source.

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Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by jakelazaroff on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:57AM (#23897865)

I don't think you even need a large graph! People have observed this happening with just two nodes, where one of the nodes is Wikipedia [1] — some website states information they learned on (or copied from) Wikipedia, and then Wikipedia cites that website as a primary source.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...

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Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Can_Not on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @08:16AM (#23916138)

Then hundreds of websites cite the wikipedia article, some without revealing their source, then become additional citations for the Wikipedia article.

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