I wonder if you might find the book “Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case” by Tongdong Bai to be interesting. It delves into exactly these issues: how to ensure that long-term interests, or the interests of future generations, are also taken into account, and not just the interests of the current electorate.
Agree. "Fact-checking" can never be more than assertions of a particular bias. I am surprised that this project has received so few critical comments along these lines here.
The idea that "specificity," such as what scientific research aims for, can be better evaluated for truthfulness or approach what "truly matters," as this project purports, is dubious. E.g., why would a notion that is more limited in scope matter more than something more vast (to use the word that it cites as an example)? In addition to its dystopian idea of a "source of truth," it completely dismisses "vague" language in the name of "science" or "factuality," which is utterly the opposite of science, which I thought was to understand ourselves and nature with as few presuppositions as possible.
How is information qualified as evidence (e.g., the “Evidence Crawler” functionality)?
The best case scenario would seem to be that results are derived from certain biases built into the model, unless it weighs “factuality” by the number of occurrences of certain statements on the internet which is as far from a qualification for truthfulness as the biased model.
It was a little difficult to wrap my head around at first, but for me its main benefit is this:
In many static site generators, if there is a page in a collection of pages (say, a product page) that you want to add a custom layout to (but without affecting other pages in that collection), you often need to create a separate template, or modify the default template to allow for this exception. With Soupault, page content is typically written in HTML and giving a specific page a custom layout is as simple as including an <html> element in that page’s content file and it will be treated as a completely standalone page. In other words, a content file is not as different from a template as in typical static site generators.
This flexibility and HTML-first approach cuts down on complex or sprawling templates introduced to deal with many exceptions. And as a result, someone only needs to know HTML to make most edits to a website. Of course, you can make certain patterns more efficient with “widgets” (basically snippets to insert content dynamically) defined in the main configuration file, but it is not requisite.
At the end of the day, the website is mostly just HTML with a simple project directory structure, which makes it understandable to a wider audience, which is important to me since I want the website to be easily understandable for future maintainers of it.
Edit: Another benefit is that Soupault is a single statically-linked executable with no dependencies, and therefore can be downloaded via a simple link. This also extends the longevity of websites built with it (i.e. it is easy to get the development environment setup).