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It may not be too late for a little course correction on how were all consuming and evaluating or not information in a digital environment.

But squeezing some ideological diversity into readers media diets is far from a silver bullet to the problem of misinformation and partisan echo chambers slicing society into isolated realities.

The idea that youll get to truth by, for instance, just reading Breitbart and then Truthout, and somehow will come to truth, is kind of a bizarre idea, Mike Caulfield said, when I told him about friends who, post-election, have been trying to balance out the liberal bias in the media they consume.

The wiki houses student submissions of various claims that have made the rounds online, across lots of different fields in addition to politics, from environment to hate speech to race and immigration to psychology and neuroscience. Students from participating institutions work in public, collectively, to fill out the life cycle of the claim and summarize and weight the viewpoints that have been shared online about that claim, a sort of Know Your Meme of viral information.

The page on the infamous three million illegals voted claim, for instance, includes the following cautious reasoning from students on the veracity of that claim: There are no good reasons to believe this claim, and numerous reasons to doubt it, the student editing the wiki page concluded. The primary reason to doubt it is that zero evidence has been presented. The entire case is a tweet where someone claims to have evidence. You can also check out the pages revisions, find a list of sites that spread the original claim, and browse for links to additional analysis on the claim. The voter fraud claim was labeled highly unlikely a designation that could easily be debated through editing the wiki, Caulfield suggested.

When were after truth, our simple definition, for the purposes of the wiki, is that truth is something generally believed by people in a position to know, that are likely to tell the truth, Caulfield said. But people are getting obsessed with the Are they likely to tell the truth? piece of this, without getting into the question of Are they in a position to know?' (Sites that aggregate and spin someone elses reporting, or rely on sources who werent at an event to weigh on on what happened there? Not in a position to know.)

The wiki is part of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities American Democracy Project, started shortly after the November U.S. election; so far, its been shared only within the AASCU network, though anyone with a .edu email can register, gearing up for a wider launch in June. Several schools are plugged into the wiki so far, and its use case goes beyond teaching media literacy.

Its an idea that fits well into a lot of different classes. You can drop it in a public policy class, you can drop it in a writing class, Caulfield said. One neuroscience class is using the wiki to address suspect psychological science claims. An environmental class is looking at tensions around water use and contributing factors to drought.

The wiki is linked up with a Hypothesis annotation widget to allow students to point to specific lines from anything they link to to back up their fact checks. The process of writing new pages may feel clunky to students (the tech for public wikis just feel years behind the times), and some users write into a Google Doc, which is then ported over into the wiki. The open source DokuWiki software that Digipo runs on is just a temporary solution. Ideally, Caulfield said, hed find a tech partner that could provide an easier-to-use platform, one that doesnt necessarily only involve students.

If other people could build that framework, we could just focus on the pedagogy, getting students to think about this stuff, and people who are much better at the other piece could take care of the technology, Caulfield said. We have to come up with something better than Google Docs.

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This Wikipedia for fact-checking by students makes more room for context and origins of claims online - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

I have long been a defender of Wikipedia. The fact that it allows for instant correction makes it far more reliable than many Pulitzer Award winning books, which sometimes have errors on their first page.

And the way it has maintained balance in the midst of national socio-political debates has been remarkable.

But if that applies to the big stories, I have good reasons to know that Wikipedia can also be a tool for political bullies to target their personal enemies.

For many years now my own Wikipedia site has been controlled by competing trolls who seem to have different agendas. I am told by people in the publishing industry that it has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.

Even when I get a contract I have to send links to publishers to show the accurate information.

Recently, a new Wiki editor has become involved and seems to be trying to clean up the site, for example, he (or she) has finally corrected my name, and this leads me to have hope that someone at Wikipedia will try to correct other mistakes that have been ongoing for years and, additionally, bring some balance to this article.

Here are some of the issues:

My humble thanks to anyone who has any advice or knowledge of any legal help available to address these issues.

I have no ill will toward Wikipedia and continue to defend it to teachers and educators, because of its quick chance to correct mistakes.

But sadly, my own personal experience has been disappointing.

If this site is not important enough to warrant supervision and rescue from persons who have a personal agenda why dont they take it down?

If it has to exist, then why should it be controlled by people who dont even know my name or my birthdate and who only see it as a utility to hurt someone they imagine to be their political enemy?

If any of you have any similar experiences let me know.

Doug Wead is a presidential historian who served as a senior adviser to the Ron Paul presidential campaign. He is a New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and adviser to two presidents, including President George H.W. Bush. He is the author of "Game of Thorns: Inside the Clinton-Trump Campaign of 2016," which is due to be released on Feb. 28, 2017. Read more reports from Doug Wead Click Here Now.

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Al Sharpton To Speak Tuesday In DeKalb Patch.com Sharpton, a longtime activist, heads the National Action Network and hosts a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast called Keepin it Real." The popular podcast delves into current events allows Sharpton to opine on the socioeconomic issues of ...

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Al Sharpton To Speak Tuesday In DeKalb - Patch.com

The Anti Defamation League is now calling 'Pepe the Frog' a form of hate speech. Time

Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character turned Internet meme, has been added to the Anti-Defamation Leagues database of hate symbols.(Photo: Screenshot)

Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character turned Internet meme, has been added to the Anti-Defamation Leagues database of hate symbols.

The character was added to the database Tuesday, after Pepe the Frog was depicted as a slew of racially charged caricatures including Hitler and a Klansman, according to the group.

Once again, racists and haters have taken a popular Internet meme and twisted it for their own purposes of spreading bigotry and harassing users, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO said in a statement.

Greenblatt said many had abused the image to harass and spread hatred on social media.

But Pepe the Frog wasnt always considered a hate symbol.

The frog first appeared in Matt Furie's Boy's Clubcartoons in 2005.

Known as the sad frog, Pepe was often depicted as a mellow characterwith the slogan feels good, man, among others. Just a year ago, celebrities like Katy Perry shared the meme alongside many other Americans.

ADL notes that Pepes Internet meme famedomtook a turn for the worstwhen the character spread to the websites4chan, 8chan and Reddit, where a subset of memes came into existence promoting anti-Jewish, bigoted and offensive ideas.

The meme was also recently dragged into politics. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump's sonposted aphotoshopped photo depictinghis father and Pepe the Frog as The Deplorables. He later said he didn't know there was a negative connotation to the character.

In response to the photo, Hillary Clinton's campaign posted anin-depth explainer on Pepe the Frog and his ties to white supremacy.

Furie recently told the Atlantic the politicalization of Pepe and Clinton's explainerdownplaythe importance the mellow character holdsfor many young people.

He believes the demonization of Pepe will be a "passing phase."

"Pepe is more than, whatever is happening in the news today, especially to younger people and to teenagers," he told the Atlantic."For example, I get emails pretty regularly, from kids, from high schools, who need my permission to use Pepe in their senior shirts, or their clarinet club, or their photography clubs, and I tell them to go ahead as long as they sell me a shirt."

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Pepe the Frog declared a hate symbol by Anti-Defamation League

The white nationalism that seems to have flourished over the past year is showing up in an unlikely place: applications for vanity license plates.

The California agency that fields thousands of foulmouthed, often childish requests for personalized plates think PASZGAZ and BUBEEE is turning down dozens of applications every month because they appear to embrace bigotry, according to public records reviewed by The Chronicle.

Plate requests rejected by the Department of Motor Vehicles in the second half of 2016 often included the letters HH and the numbers 88 and 18, which can represent well-known codes for Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

One motorist was denied a bid for 1KTKKK8, with the DMV noting the possible reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

Another wasnt allowed to get PEPE Y, despite explaining in the application that it signified both a peppy car and a dogs name. The state reviewers noted that the request probably referred to the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme and a symbol to many of white nationalism.

DMV officials cant be sure that all the references are intentional. Some of the 88 submissions, for instance, may refer to the number as a symbol of good fortune in Chinese culture.

But since last spring, the agency has denied as many as 80 plate requests a month for being possibly associated with white supremacy and intolerance. The DMV does not track specific reasons for denials year to year, making historic comparisons difficult.

The drivers explanations for wanting the plates, and the DMVs explanations for shooting them down, were obtained through a public records request.

The rejections are made by trained reviewers who each year screen tens of thousands of vanity plate applications for indecency. The group is picky, regularly nixing any request even stretching sensitivity or hinting at impropriety, from configurations believed to denote gangs with a certain color, such as ICRED, to connotations to drugs and alcohol, including IVYPRFN.

Sexual themes are also off limits, as are most references to race and ethnicity and guns. LADYGRY was scrapped because of its possible association to the steamy novel and film Fifty Shades of Grey.

Although the DMV was reluctant to discuss trends in the past year, an examination of the agencys records shows references to sex, vulgar language and violence topped the roll of rejects. But potential references to white supremacy were not far behind. And they outnumbered other political statements, including IH8TRMP, which was also rejected.

The requests for coded symbols like 88 on license plates may mark another extension of this troll-ish culture thats intimately associated with the alt-right, said Keegan Hankes, a research analyst who tracks white nationalist groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

Keegan and others who study extremism say President Trumps rise made many people with racist views more comfortable expressing themselves.

They feel a little more emboldened now, he said. They start feeling like theyre not as fringe as they actually are.

The rejected plate configurations included USA 88 and VADER 18. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 88 is code for Heil Hitler because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. The more esoteric 18 can reference Hitlers initials, while 14 can stand for a 14-word slogan popular among white supremacists.

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of UC Berkeleys Center for Right-Wing Studies, speculates that many seeking such plates want the codes on their cars to reflect what they see as a secret society.

Theres undoubtedly some type of recognition within this extreme neo-Nazi right of whos in and whos out, Rosenthal said. The closest thing weve had historically to these neo-Nazis is the KKK, and they were famous for the way in which they confided in who belonged and who did not.

Although the records reviewed by The Chronicle dont include the names of those applying for personalized plates, several motorists told the DMV they had benign reasons for pursuing configurations that were ultimately denied. One person seeking 88 PWR88 explained that it was a combination of family initials and the lucky number 88 but didnt get it.

While state law requires the DMV to screen plates for appropriateness, what that means is largely left to the reviewers.

Agency officials, who declined to be interviewed but answered several questions via email, said they had no blanket policy of banning numbers like 88. Each request, they said, was evaluated on its merit.

If a reviewer cant determine the meaning of a plate or it appears questionable, officials said, it is forwarded to an eight-person committee. The members, who vary in age and ethnicity and are fluent in many languages and cultures, are experienced at decoding communications and understanding symbols and slang.

The DMV seeks to reject any application that may carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency, or which would be misleading, said spokesperson Artemio Armenta.

While Trump and top members of his administration have said they dont tolerate the type of bigotry that recently has become more vocal, the presidents anti-immigration policies and his disparaging statements about Mexicans and Muslims have drawn a following on the far right.

Despite the states diversity, many of those who embrace white supremacy are from California, said UC Berkeleys Rosenthal. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies California as one of the top places for hate groups.

They have been mobilized and energized as never before by the Trump candidacy and now the Trump presidency, Rosenthal said. Just imagine you have been at the fringe of American society for so long, and suddenly someone is talking your language in presidential politics. How would you feel?

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @kurtisalexander

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Battling bumper bigotry: DMV fights ugly messages on the road ... - San Francisco Chronicle