Source consensus is the principle by which a system favours a claim that is independently confirmed by several trustworthy sources over a claim that stands alone. This reduces the risk of nonsense spreading, but it has two unpleasant consequences. The first is inertia: if an inaccuracy about your company has circulated for a long time, correcting it on your own website is not enough until other places where the information appears pick it up too. The second is that a new or minority claim that is true but still isolated is put at a disadvantage. In practice, this means that key data – name, registered office, scope of services, prices, staffing – must be looked after everywhere, not just on the website: in registers, directories, profiles, on professional networks and in third-party articles. Consistency matters here more than the volume of text.
See also: Entity Disambiguation, Grounding, Information gain.
