Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Wants Truth Ratings For Websites
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.'"
...a truthiness rating!
There. Now you know.
... but for Facts, not Truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What is to prevent any such proposed system from becoming yet another popularity contest plagued by those who want to quash unpopular ideas?
slashdot's been wrong in the past.
This sounds like an exercise in futility
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What's really needed is a society where a majority of the individuals have a world class education. No rating system will ever work until you get that in place.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
In Soviet Russia, truth rates YOU!
Waitaminit....that's almost how it should be...
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.
So you can laugh all you want to...
Quick! Someone hide kdawson!
The onion is far more accurate than your average editorial page.
No, those are statistics...its different.
Sorry Mr. Twain.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
The onion is far more accurate than your average editorial page.
Perhaps, but it is a rather bad reference on actual onions.
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.
She made the willows dance
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.
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.
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.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
... 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.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.