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Submit Evidence

Problem

Evidence can help to build confidence in the project data

Context

The provenance of a fact or observation is an important part of some projects. Documenting the provenance of individual contributions can be essential to building trust in the data

Solution

Require contributors to submit evidence to support their contributions

Provenance is important in building trust in data. Relating individual fields and records to real-world observations or primary sources can help to build confidence that data has been correctly captured.

Capturing provenance is important for all datasets. It can be important in collaborative maintenance projects because of the wider group of people involved in collecting and maintaining the data.

Providing evidence for contributions can also help contributors carry out Retrospective Reviews as they can use the evidence to guide their reviews.

Different projects will have different forms of acceptable evidence:

  • When making observations in the real world, a contributor could submit a Proof of Witness such as a photograph or a GPS trace.
  • For a project that is building a shared database or catalogue contributors might be prompted to Cite Sources by including a reference to an authoritative, independent source.


Related patterns

Cite Sources

Verifying the factual claims in a record is difficult without a cross reference to a primary source.

Proof of Witness

Validating real-world observations is difficult without having proof

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