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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton
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2007-04-22
Just the Facts, Ma’am: Integrity In BloggingCoding Horror: Apparently Bloggers Aren't Journalists. Jeff Atwood has an interesting blog entry that contrasts a certain kind of echo chamber, “what he said,” approach to blogging with the ethical responsibilities of journalists. It seems very easy to link to someone else’s position and credit its validity without any fact checking and, in particular, effort to verify sources and what those sources actually provided. Atwood offers a great example. You can find more examples of fact-checking and careful verification by following Ed Bott’s columns. Scott Hanselman provides useful by-example fact checking too. The greatest thing is that you can reproduce these experiments and satisfy yourself. (My examples are around Microsoft technology because that is where I have most of my attention. Those focused on other technologies and areas of the industry doubtless have examples of their own with regard to who is careful and who isn’t.) I run into this far too frequently when I see misunderstandings and clear misrepresentations of software behavior. On some forums I keep my eye on, there are often helpful answers that are simply wrong or passing along of developer myths that have never been accurate and have always been poor advice. This disregard for facts also shows up in claims about file formats that no one seems to have attempted to verify. In fact, I have seen people pontificate at length with a tiny passage at the end about having not actually read the spec, run the software, etc. Most of life is an empirical science. That means check the work and, if it involves someone else’s claims, attempting to duplicate the result and, if that fails, asking the originator for more details. The comment stream on Atwood's post is interesting, and there are important remarks about how, in addition to providing checked sources, it is responsible to make corrections and adjustments as further details come to light and as our own mistakes are caught by others. This is not about being perfect, it is about how we care for our own veracity and are responsible for what we lend our voice to. It is about carefulness and follow-up. When I first saw Atwood’s post, I took this as some affirmation of my view of appropriate scholarship, another realm where something like journalistic integrity comes into play. It is at the bedrock of scientific exploration and investigation that there be a sufficient account that your results can be verified and observations repeated and confirmed, wherever possible. Likewise, for general scholarship and analysis work, we are obligated to provide sources that others can check and also determine whether our interpretations are sound, whether or not they meet with agreement. Interpretations are not facts and there is room for disagreement. But we should be able to agree on what the essential facts are before delineating the basis for disagreement on interpretation. I over-write. (I think I am doing it now.) I always want to provide enough information about my sources, the claimed facts, and the derived interpretations to be easily checked. I want to be reliable for that, even if what I say is disagreeable.
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