This Might Be Useful

Dispute Finder is supposed to be a Firefox extension that, given a claim, will help locate evidence contrary to it. It might be the start of something resembling Resartus (with my earlier comments here) or it might be another web site under the control of People-with-Too-Much-Free-Time.

According to the Dispute Finder blog:

You can now more easily unmark snippets other people have marked. The intention is that this be used if you see that someone is spamming the system. This is combined with a background moderation system that lets us see when users are disagreeing over whether something is making a disputed claim.

It's easy to see that this might be gamed. It's also possible that the administrators might crack down faster on abuses on one side of an issue than on the other side. We'll have to watch them.

A more subtle form of gaming the system is possible. It's possible to use the system to collect evidence against a straw man argument and pretend it's evidence against against a robust argument. We might even see graduates of the “University of Google” get advanced degrees at Dispute Finder.