Week 5 Shift: The sourcing bench

A worked comparison of two standards of evidence, run over the same claim, until you can tell which project you are in by what it refuses

22 March 2027

Bench work. One claim, two epistemologies, and the afternoon it takes to find out they cannot be reconciled.

Before the Shift#

Choose a claim about a physical thing in the world: a road, a building, a boundary, a closure. Something you could in principle go and look at, and that somebody has also published about.

In the Shift#

Build the dossier twice. Once to Wikipedia’s standard — published, independent, attributable, and you are forbidden from relying on having been there. Once to OSM’s — survey, trace, imagery, local knowledge, and a newspaper counts for almost nothing.

Somewhere in the middle you will find a source that one project trusts completely and the other will not touch. Write it down. That source is the course’s whole argument about provenance, compressed into a footnote.

Last half hour: link rot. Run your citations, find the dead ones, archive the live ones. About one in nine of Wikipedia’s is already gone, and more than half its articles have at least one.

Afterwards#

The dossier goes in the Log. In week 6 you will watch someone’s article get deleted over exactly this kind of disagreement.