Inspiration
The inspiration for this project came from the fact that we are living in a world with a lot of digital information, and not all of it is true. As engineering students, we were inspired to take the initiative in solving this problem. We depend a lot on online resources, and as a result, run into a lot of articles. We believed it would be helpful to create a website to source and verify the trustworthiness of a certain article. That way we can learn and help others by sharing our experiences about an article on its validity and level of accuracy, and also identify the credentials of who is making the claim about the article in question.
What it does
The website lets users rate news articles for how trustworthy they are and filter ratings for relevant expertise
How we built it
We used a Django framework to host our API and navigate between pages. Using a bootstrap template, we made a decent front end and stored all of our data in a sqlite database.
Challenges we ran into
No one had any web development experience. Not only was this the first hackathon for all the members involved, for most of us, it was also our first time using Github. A big challenge was modifying through Git with the limited bandwidth that some members had. While we communicated with each other effectively, we had to learn a lot of information regarding Git. In addition, one of the members for our team did not show up at all during the Hack-a-thon, so we ended up recruiting another member in his place the next day. This increased the responsibilities of group members significantly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The site looks great, front end went swimmingly. The concept is intelligent and relevant to the current climate of information verification. Based on the time frame and all the challenges, we are proud that we have a functioning website, as the learning curve was rather steep.
What we learned
We learned how the Django framework works, and how apps use forms to edit member functions. We also learned that the Git command prompt is less buggy for execution of push and pull tasks, compared to doing it through the Git client. We also learned that having good internet is crucial, as the hack-a-thon was virtual. We also learned how to get a website running in Python. Lastly, all of us learned how a hack-a-thon project works for the very first time.
What's next for newsRate
We are looking forward to implementing the ability for the user to search for articles, rate them, and filter them based on a five point scale, where 5 is very credible, and 1 is not credible. The idea is to let people input their ratings based on whether or not they're verified. Verification should be implemented through SMS verification and/or two-factor authentication, including a reCAPTCHA, to stop spammers. We will also include a feature for checking a user's authority on the articles in question.
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