Hi Mark, yes, this project has a lot of potential - we just need to iron out the kinks and improve the process over time. 'Mining the truth' is a powerful idea indeed!
The best way to simplify the process is to create a custom website for Crowd Facts that makes the process of posting requests and leaving comments much clearer - but we need to build up to that.

The main thing is to use common sense when making requests.. People need to make sure that they put enough information into their request that the community can work with it and provide relevant information. We will do our best to work with posters to improve their requests when necessary and our curation levels on request posts will reflect the posts level of quality & completeness.

Over time, the strategy of offering higher curation rewards for more complete and useful fact check request posts should nudge the system in the right direction - but we will continually improve the process regardless.

Note: We will post a Crowd Fact Request very soon that can act as a real world example - it's not really so complicated! :)