Acting deputy editor Africa Check
Kate Wilkinson is acting chief deputy editor at Africa Check, the continent's first fact-checking website. The non-profit organisation was set up in 2012 to promote accuracy in public debate and the media in Africa. It works to raise the quality of information available to societies across the continent.
Her main research areas include education, immigration, crime and viral social media hoaxes. In 2018, she discovered an error in the South African police service's annual crime statistics which lead to an official revision.
She leads the organisation's media work, with regular appearance on local and international television and radio. Her work also involves training African journalists on verification and research techniques. In 2017, she developed a programme which taught school children how to decipher fact from fiction on social media.
Kate has a first class honours in international relations from the University of Cape Town.
It is generally believed that numbers are hard and judgements are soft. But metrics and indices are much softer than we would like to think. With case studies from Africa Check, Morten Jerven covers the basics of cross examining statistics.