Fact Checking Resources

» Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets | OUseful.Info

“The Google spreadsheet function =importHTM(””,”table”,N) will scrape a table from an HMTL web page into a Google spreadsheet. The URL of the target web page, and the target table element both need…

» Election Protection - The Nation's Largest Nonpartisan Voter Protection Coalition

“Throughout the election process, our volunteers - more than 10,000 strong - will be entering data and information into OurVote live (developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation), an interactive…

» Innovate this: Searching dirty

“Information that is supposed to be private can sometimes inadvertently leak onto the web, through careless coding, or scanning, or editing, or incorrect placement on a server.”

» Economic Data available for free online

UK-focused but useful for U.S.-based reporting.

» PHP: file_get_contents - Manual

Add one insert query and you’re good to go.

» Scraping Links With PHP | Makebeta

» How to do a Conditional HTTP GET with Python urllib2 | Python Buzz Forum

Another Python script that can be useful for site scraping. This one will first check to see if anything on a site has changed before initializing the scrape.

» Beautiful Soup documentation - Parse Tree

Use the Parse Tree second of this Python-based parsing tool to scrape sites.

» Searching a listserv's archives

Need to search through thousands of listserv messages? Do it through email with this cheatsheet.

» FedStats Data Access Tools

This a fantastic index of science and environment-related datasets produced by the U.S. government. Checkout DataFerrett (linked on page), which is the data extraction tool. It’s not easy to use, but…