Berners-Lee Wants Truth Ratings For Websites 535
holy_calamity writes "While introducing the new World Wide Web Foundation Tim Berners-Lee made also asked for a system of ratings to help people distinguish truth and untruth online. 'On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly,' he said, saying that 'there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.'"
Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ironically, the Op's statement is more insightful than many people may realize. Let's face it, there is alot of crap floating around that masquerades as "Truth". The entire "9/11 Truth" movement, for example. (Which, I suspect, is what the OP got the "truthiness" quip from. A mock on the "truther" movement.)
The point is, WHO is to be the arbiter of "truth"? And how do we know they won't have a political agenda? I think that the major problem is not that some sites need a "true" or "not true" label, bu
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
"Which, if I am correct..."
You're aren't correct.
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Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Funny)
I think their word of the past year was "w00t!"
The mating call of the homosexual barn owl?
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I agree it's critical to sort which people you interact with, but if you're using strict language as a key indicator, I'm going to guess you're doing a poor job sorting.
Do you not socialize with people who use casual language constructs practically to improve rapport with others? Do you not socialize with any creative people who find the natural evolution of language to be fun and interesting? Do you not socialize with any people who learned English as a second (or third) language because their grammar is
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we sort the uneducated from the educated?
Considering that usage of a popular term has no relationship to the level of education that person has, you're facing that problem already. You're just going to have to find less shallow ways of judging people.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
yo wassup
i no what u mean ppl keep judgng me on how i right ppl shld quit jugdng me on hwo i right
(Gah, I hate myself for writing that)
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You're just going to have to find less shallow ways of judging people.
Why? Everybody does that! Here's how we should solve the education problem in this country : focus entirely on grammar, vocabulary and literature. Why bother trying to educate people when you can just make them sound educated?
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website to get a -1 Troll for adding words I don't use to its dictionary, thus legitimizing people who aren't just like me to make the world a place where I am not perceived as superior to them.
I often use language as a means to reaffirm my biases, and I am too good for people who express the concept of "salutations" in a different way than me. Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we know who to look down for superficial reasons? I won't even touch upon the reasons for making the distinction in one's personal life, because if you don't share my personal bias you are an ignorant slob, and I'm better than you.
Note: Try reading the introduction to a dictionary, where they explain their methods and purpose. You'll find that they are not written to address the purpose you are trying to burden them with. So you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you need help, you can start here [merriam-webster.com]. Read especially the last section. (Their procedure is typical of a dictionary).
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm with you. In fact, I'm taking Latin classes at the moment so I can finally avoid vulgar tongues entirely.
The language of Shakespeare is too recent an invention for my tastes; it's the language of Cicero for me!
And for anyone who might find this viewpoint absurd, keep in mind that I'm not taking it too far, like those Sanskrit-only types.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Someone mod him up lest the rest miss him. Do you REALLY want to know how well /. would hold up in a test for truth?
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
Critical thinking will never be in high schools as long as we have programs like No Child Left Behind.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm thinking we need a "Truth Authority" coalition. Maybe the Catholic Church, the U.S. Government, and Fortune 500 companies -- they have a good track record so far.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
That may be even harder to make happen than to implement a fair and accurate "truthfulness" rating.
That said, I'm opposed to the idea of any kind of trust ranking. It promotes intellectual laziness, which we already have enough of, and would work against what you promote.
As far as I'm concerned, we need to push tools that stimulate critical thinking and logic. Any system that purports to provide a trustworthiness value of a source is dangerous to society in the long run, for reasons given in others' posts (e.g., groupthink).
Research shows ratings would have inverse effect (Score:5, Interesting)
... for conservatives, at least.
Consider this research, which I saw yesterday - possibly the most depressing thing I have read in terms of seeing rational politics and governance in my lifetime. Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375_pf.html
For example, when shown a clip of George Bush in 2003 claiming Iraq had WMD's, 35% of conservatives agree. When shown the same clip plus the 2004 Duelfer report (compiled by a Bush appointee) which demonstrated that Iraq did not have WMD's, suddenly 64% of conservatives believe the weapons were there.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue. In general, when shown expert testimony that contradicts preestablished beliefs, conservatives' beliefs go the other way: experts in general have negative credibility with half the country.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
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Websites? (Score:3, Funny)
I want hese ratings on PEOPLE. They need to be endorsed by the official Ministry of Truth.
This law is enacted retroactively, yesterday.
Those not conforming to official truth records are subject to reformation and compulsory psychological medication.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd mod you +1 truthy (but I could be making this up).
This article is not true. (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, according to who? ;-)
Who's truth?
As Napoleon once said: "History is a set of lies agreed upon"
I mean, a page describing how Jesus ascended into heaven after being buried. Is that truthful? I guess one billion people would say it is.
Quite often, truth is just what most people think. Burning witches in the dark ages was fine, because we _knew_ they were witches.
This seems like some guy who just woke up after believing some dude was going to send him one million dollars, and now he wants the internet to
Re:This article is not true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice ...
So in the Not very Dark ages not very many witches (of all ages and genders) were not burnt, and not by the church ...
This is the problem with truth : Everything most people know to be true is wrong
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"This is the problem with truth : Everything most people know to be true is wrong"
42
That should about settle things for everyone.
drew
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If you want a good source on this, try this book:
http://www.fieldsbooks.com/cgi-bin/fields/A469.html [fieldsbooks.com]
Despite the lurid title, its a fairly scholarly work written by a respectable scholar with ample footnotes and examples.
Witches were hung in England, but burnt in much of Europe and Scotland. There were not as many so killed as people think, but in places like Germany it was still pretty frightening. From what I recall, most of the trials and executions for Witchcraft took place in the 1500-1700s mostlly, wel
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Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice ...
Indeed... They were so against the practice that two catholic inquisitors published a guide [slashdot.org] to help magistrates find them and convict them, ie. put them to death.
Ironically enough, the spread of this odious work was even enhanced by "modern" technology, in the form of Mr Guttenberg's little invention.
Common estimates for deaths are from 40,000 to 100,000, and mostly women.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I disrupt your little piece of historical revisionism there? My bad.
I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can you just imagine all the poor people who are heavily confused about the state of affairs in Soviet Russia after reading slashdot? How were they to know that these things were untrue!?
Re:I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Waitaminit....that's almost how it should be...
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Can you just imagine all the poor people who are heavily confused about the state of affairs in Soviet Russia after reading slashdot? How were they to know that these things were untrue!?
Wait a minute. This is just a special case of internationalization!
1. Check visitors IP
2. Look up geo-position
3. Serve up localized truth
4. ???
5. Profit!!!
Re:I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA is /.ed, and MirrorDot's not behaving, so this is a shot in the dark. But I'm reasonably sure we've heard something like this before, and the idea is just as bad now as it was. Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed. I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
Moreover, the WWW as he created it - being a very dumb platform - allows us to implement such a scale at a high level, using user input and so forth.There are already a ton of services that do something very like this. Hell, I can trust the top 10 things on del.icio.us more than I can trust random Google results.
I donno. I just fail to see the point of this. Yeah, people's capacity to care about facts and details appears to be limited, but I don't think this is the solution.
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I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
The idea here seems to be more of a "FooOrg TruthRank" that you could subcribe to, "He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".". Isn't there a browser toolbar that will show the google pagerank of pages you visit? I think the idea is something like that.
Re:I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
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And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is to prevent any such proposed system from becoming yet another popularity contest plagued by those who want to quash unpopular ideas?
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, my friends, is the exact problem with Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term). Allow "democratic" control of content, and all content eventually converges on boobs and beer, because it is the lowest common denominator for a lot of Internet users. I need only cite digg.com for this point.
Bury (Score:5, Funny)
Please dont go against the groupthink on diggdot. Until then, I have no choice but to bury your comment and then reply to it flaming you.
It is a well known fact that George Bush used dozens of Cops with Tasers to bring down Richard Stallman for Smoking Legal Pot for his Melanoma. We should ban Tasers, Bush, Cops and vote Paul/Stallman for 2008 (Paul is still running, the MSM just lies about it).
Also, the moon landing is a hoax, 9/11 really happened on 9/12 but the Pepsi bottling company wanted it moved a day to sell more soda so the fat cats in Washington fucked with the calandar to make it so (this is true, there have been several other diggdot stories proving it...), and Diebold stole every election since Hoover.
Now digg my comment *up* please--if not for stating the obvious, but for its inner truth.
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Its not. This is just a glaring example of what happens when people who are good at one thing start applying themselves to other things. TBL is good with the ol' hypertext but social issues of truth and bias? Not so much. It reminds me of all those quotes people have of Einstein in their sigs. If they arent about relativity then why bother?
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about religion: Christianity, Islam, Scientology?
How about acupuncture or homeopathy?
Or to be really contentious how about OS feature debates?
Quite!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Easy!
>UFO
False
> paranormal phenomena
False
> Christianity
True
> Islam
True
> Scientology
False
> acupuncture
True
> homeopathy
False
> OS feature debates?
False
Next!
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Funny)
At what point did Berners-Lee appoint themselves Rulers of the Truth?
Shortly after aquiring multiple personalities [wikipedia.org]?
What about text editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about sites that slam MySQL?
What about Vi vs Emacs?
Hell... lets be serious:
What about insiders who are leaking information about the next enron?
What about global warming?
What about academic sites that publish research linking cell phones to cancer? What if a paper is published that actually does connect them? How do you prevent it's "truthliness" from getting freeped by people with vested interests in the status quo?
What about a pharmaceutical website that claims their medication is safe despite mounting evidence it shuts down the liver?
What about a website that has recipes for making heavy grade explosives? How do you rate the truth in something that only a terrorist or a government can test?
What is the truthliness of Homestarrunner?
What about the story published in the National Enquirer about John Edwards affairs when nobody believed them?
This is another version of The Semantic Web and is just as impossible to pull of as the original. Both fail to take into account the tenancy to lie and exaggerate things to promote your world views. They operate under "as long as everybody plays by the rules this idea is perfect!"... which is a very stupid idea unless you've got a legal framework to enforce the rules.
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I don't know if I believe this... (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the "goodluckwiththat" tag (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the "goodluckwiththat" tag (Score:5, Funny)
Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:4, Informative)
PageRank is a popularity contest, not a truth gauge.
Otherwise how do you explain The Onion as the first result for "onion"
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:5, Insightful)
The onion is far more accurate than your average editorial page.
Perhaps, but it is a rather bad reference on actual onions.
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:4, Insightful)
a popularity contest, not a truth gauge
The distinction is, I regret, becoming increasingly subtle.
But truthiness is more important! (Score:2, Interesting)
Like www.martinlutherking.org
Wow that's a shit storm of truthiness right there. Can someone out there DDoS the fuck out of it while they're at it?
Re:But truthiness is more important! (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone out there DDoS the fuck out of it while they're at it?
Why? It's not like it's a danger. It's just information contrary to normal belief. I may not agree with it, but I don't think that it's worthy of FPMITA prison.
Uhmmm Yeah, sure! (Score:2)
... and who is going to watch the watchers?
Or rather, in this case who is going to vet the group responsible for determining if something is true?
A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep, I'm sure there is some form of inverse square law which can be applied to a group of people: The more intelligent the group is on an individual basis as a collective whole the group rates about the same as something yet evolve out of the primordial soup...
Re:A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
And how do you educate people without trustable knowledge ?
Re:A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think that a world-class education will cause people to set aside their own prejudices on any subject? Educated people still make bone-headed analyses whenever their own ox would be gored by the "truth".
Which begs the question... (Score:2)
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Bah. I've already posted, but if I hadn't I'd mod you up. These are exactly the kind of worries one might have about a system like what Berners-Lee is suggesting.
But there's something else here. Suppose we were to pick one of the first two options you present (users or an uninvolved organization). Then the suggestion isn't terribly original. There are already sites that incorporate user input to rank sites (and some of them *koff*digg*koff* don't work all that well). And the idea of a neutral fact-checking
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So you are asking this question?
"What is truth? Is your truth the same as mine?"
What rating would be given,
The Roman Catholic Church?
The Mormons?
Scientology?
What about Global Warming sites? What about sites that say Global Warming is a theory and is unproven?
Facts are easy to rate. A site that claims that a Toyota Prius gets 3000 MPG is has their facts wrong.
A site that says the McCain is a Nazi would have their facts wrong.
But Truth is much harder.
Truth rate this post (Score:2)
Ok, let's truth rate (True or False answers only) the following sentence in this post:
"This sentence is false."
Re:Truth rate this post (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, let's truth rate (True or False answers only) the following sentence in this post:
"This sentence is false."
I'd have to give it 3 trues out of 5 possible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How so?
There is only one factoid contained in the given input: The sentence declares itself false.
Since we have no other information to validate against we must trust it by default, hence we assume the statement is True.
This is a bootstrapping problem. We must trust the very first factoid entering a system or we'll never get started.
Alternatively we could decide to disallow self-referential input.
Really, these puzzles are completely irrelevant in a peer reputation system.
probably what he has in mind (Score:2)
Using semantic web tools, this can be achieved with reification of statements, and a network of trust. It's also the future of wikipedia, or at least it should be.
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Unfortunately I think Knol has that covered.
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Exactly.
Tim thinks deeper than most /. posters. From the article:
He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
That sounds a lot like a Credence-like system. There isn't "one truth", there are many truths. I would personally value the science truth more and the biblical "truth" less, but someone else might make a different decision.
As I see it, he is looking more for a kind of citation system. If your website cites others as sources, and is cited by others in return, then what you say has a higher confidence value than if you're an island on the web an
Better yet... (Score:2)
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can see it from here: TRUTHINESS WARS!
Forget about the Usenet flame wars, the Slashdot flame wars, even the Wikipedia editing wars, people... This is the Real Deal! Years after the Truthiness Wars, the Intertubes will still have that scarred, scorched look that faintly glows in the dark due to the irradiated remains of a thousand web sites.
Decades after the commotion, survivors and veterans will trade horrible, traumatic war storie...
Remember when the Vatican webmaster was allowed to rate Jack Chick [chick.com]?
And Disney allowed to rate Warner Brothers?
And Fox News allowed to rate Barack Obama's web site?
Oh, come one, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attack?
And... Wait for it... RMS and the FSF rating Microsoft? Now, THAT is what I call a nice truthiness battle, baby! The mother of all such battles, in fact. Thousands of web sites went down in that one with the infamous 0% truthiness rating. Ugly, my man, but it had to be done.
OK, does anybody else think this is a Bad Idea(tm), or am I the only one?
And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot. ;-)
And what version of the truth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your version,
Their version,
the Truth and
what actually happened.
If that works out will I see a big red pulsating "This is all bullshit" label on the Scientology or any Creationist homepage? I doubt any admin in their self-righteous mind would put something like that on their site. In the specific idiology what is true in reality is a lie in their world. So who's to decide who gets one of those and ranked by what? And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
This will NEVER work. Since everyone makes their own truths nowadays there will be just as many ranking systems as there are opinions.
Slashdot getting a truth rating? (Score:5, Funny)
Original article on BBC. (Score:3, Informative)
The original article was on the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7613201.stm [bbc.co.uk]
It should be emphasised that he isn't suggesting a "truth commission" that would tag all web pages.
He specifically said that he'd be interested to see how different organisations would label websites, depending on their intended use.
In many ways this is just a specific use of the semantic web concept that Berners-Lee and others have been trying to bring about for the last few years.
He explicitly mentions cults (Score:2)
Is this mostly a plan to get the Hubbardite sites labeled as expensive and dangerous bullshit?
RDF Anybody? (Score:2)
The W3C already pushes RDF and RDFa, which are simple, machine-readable statements. Surely this already existing technology could be used to say things like "Site X has a trustworthyness of 80%", which could be stored in a distributed network of servers, with digital signing to show who's opinion it is. Then, people/sites which are well trusted can have their opinions held in higher regard, following some algorithm. Add some rules which keep automated entries from having much weight and voila.
Yes, there wou
Who gets to decide what's true? (Score:2)
Verification by consistency (Score:2)
One way to assess the truth of information on a site is to measure whether it's consistent with information from other sites. As long as you could avoid a variant of link farming, this would work to prevent all but the most systematic vandalism.
It would even work with Wikipedia, because a vandal isn't going to know (and thus won't edit) every article that may contain information overlapping with a target article. The inconsistency between the vandalized article and others would give it away.
PageRank? (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that google page rank is probably the most effective implementation of this concept that is possible. Technically it does not ensure that the content of a website is truthful or reliable, but it does make the determination that it is popular, which is all any kind of 'press here to record that this website is truthful' is ever going to do. There are very few areas where people will agree on 'truth'. Imagine this concept applied to websites that discuss creationism for example. These kind of sites will receive many votes for being both truthful and untruthful. All you are really doing is measuring the popularity of the idea that they express.
Perhaps, an attribute could be added to the 'a' tag to indicate the type of link, so that a page author can indicate a rough reason why they have linked to a page. If I were to create a link in this post to a site that speaks of the LHCs potential to destroy the planet and called the link... "Check out these silly bastards". The PageRank of that site would increase, as there is no way to tell if I am supporting or lampooning that site with my link. A simple category system (not unlike slashdots moderations options) might help this process. So that I could add a category="funny" or category="insightful" to my link tags and any analysis tools (PageRank in particular) could adjust the ranking accordingly. Would be interesting to see what the top 10 funniest sites on the web were anyway :o)
1984 all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
Your own private graffiti (Score:2)
What we need is widespread use of web annotation [wikipedia.org] software.
Then people could judge the truthiness of anything according their own little ideological ghetto, and the rest of us wouldn't have to put up with their whining.
We haven't managed it in real life... (Score:3, Insightful)
i.e. a universal reputation system is a hard problem.
Today, we use brands for that.
trust metric (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually what we need is a trust metric. Some process that propagates trust creating a kind of trustworthiness social network so that when you encounter something new, you can get an idea of, who trusts this information.
It should be able to answer questions like: Do the people you know trust this? How about the those you rated as trustworthy? Do certain specific groups and communities trust this? Maybe it hasn't been rated enough yet?
Website Metadiscussion Layer (Score:4, Informative)
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
keep the people in their boxes. (Score:3, Insightful)
This seems little more than keeping people more tightly within the boxes they already are in. He doesn't propose a single system, but multiple different ratings systems. So the Democrats could have one, the Republicans could have one, the Scientologists could have one, the "free thinkers" could have one, the Vegans could have one, the Anti-abortionists could have one, etc. I think I'd prefer a single all-encompassing one. At least everyone would know that's bullshit.
In other words, you could always be certain how well the website you're reading corresponds to your Chosen Doctrine. Great. Hell, with such a ratings system people could filter out anything and everything that disagrees with Doctrine.
No, the current system of your friends and family telling you "You're An Idiot" when you read stupid things like "the moon landing was faked" works a lot better. Sure, it sucks too, but at least you know the people telling you you're an idiot, and occasionally get exposed to some idea you may not agree with.
In other words: Blogrolls, del.icio.us, and Karma (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get why people are slagging Tim off over this. We already do have such mechanisms on the small scale: karma points for comments, reputation systems for online trading, blogrolls and 'social bookmarking services' for 'this unknown website is recommended/suggested by this other website I read'.
Remember Advogato's rankings?
The logical next step would be to have a generic way of talking about such rankings/recommendations such that I don't need to subscribe to a third party to do it. Use, oh, I don't know, how about RDF? We've already got FOAF - how about an 'Enemy Of My Enemy' protocol?
Yes, this will lead to 'ontology wars' as groups with different views of trustworthiness start formalising the metrics they already use informally. As long as the protocol itself remains open and interconnectable, I don't see this as a huge problem. At least people will be openly owning their philosophical bias rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
Exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
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Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
"Love doesn't envy, love doesn't boast..."
"You shall not murder"
are ALL untrue in your estimation? Have you even READ the Bible? There is quite a bit in there that even the most rabid secular humanist may agree to being "true."
Re:This will never work (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry Mr. Twain.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Tim Berners-Lee advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting untruth. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to his particular idea.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we
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Likewise, you atheists have some pretty weird assertions about the beliefs of Christians.
How do we mark you?
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Censorship means denying access to information. How does rating the information as (un)trustworthy deny access?
"...it won't work perfectly which is to say it won't work - period.
Nothing works perfectly - period! However, this does not mean we throw out the Principa Mathematica.
"Look at an algorithm like PageRank which Google bombed so easily. What's to prevent miscreants from messing with
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Sadly, science and mathematics, the pillars of modern western philosophy, rely upon irreducible axioms. These axioms, if rejected, would make the entire system nonsense.
Sadly, people who don't understand science, seek to undermine science by trying to inject the framework of religion in a discussion of science.
Science is not a belief system and there are no "irreducible axioms." The whole of science is built upon layers of proof and verifiability. There is no axiom that is "self evident" to "believe." Scien
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> all you can do is expose people to issues and arguments,
> and their mind grapples with it
We can hope so, but I've seen too much from every side that indicates a lot of minds don't grapple.
Examples:
Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Sarah Palin asserts the conflict in Iraq is God's war.
The Universe is only 6000 years old.
etc, etc.
But yeah, you may be right that the obvious, really stupid stuff is good fodder for young apprentice thinkers.