4 ms·

No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat. Seriously, I don't real

No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat. Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic world on poorly monitored sites. However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed to be this "Information Superhighway" (lol, remember that term?) leading to a more informed society. This just hasn't panned out the way the tech utopians of the 90s thought it would. What they failed to foresee is that the abundance of information can lead to just as much ignorance as the lack of information.

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mangeletti 10y ago
I think the problems you're bringing up cannot be solved. Information (re: "Information Superhighway") is information. In this utopian idea of "quality control", who does the quality control? Houghton Mifflin[1]? If history is just a set of lies agreed upon[2], I'd rather have the consensus of the Internet than whoever it is you purport should be in control of quality. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/... 2. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968.html http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968....
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
  Not necessarily. The key problem is that primary sources are either in non-searchable hardcopy format (books, etc.) or inaccessible behind paywalls, making it impractical to do wide-ranging research outside of the academic libraries maintained by by large universities. It would take quite a major revision to copyright law but it's not impossible to imagine some future version of a library where one can search digitized versions of all known works and correlate between them.
- alexandercrohde 10y ago
  What are you talking about "cannot be solved"? Per the article "The only place that’s still entirely accurate is Wikipedia, hilariously enough." And for tvtome, "It was a user-edited wiki for TV shows. To be an editor for the big, popular shows you had to prove why you were qualified" Clearly there are systems that are much more robust against tampering than others. I'm sure dozens or hundreds of people came across this streets shark stuff on IMDB and thought "This is an error" but had no way to report it on IMDB. Wikipedia solves that problem (and in the event of dispute there's a full history).
NoMoreNicksLeft 10y ago
> However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. It's not a "lack of quality control". It's that the internet is data-starved. I'm familiar with how much data is recorded each year, and it seems paradoxical that we could still be data-starved, but it is so. Starving people/organizations ignore all the warning signs. They're desperate for what it is that they seek. The people looking for this bit of nostalgia want to be able to find information on it. Synopses, screenshots, and even videos. For these people, there aren't any substitutes. And the internet just doesn't have much on it (not like some Encyclopedia Britannica editor will have spent 18 months tracking down real information on this show). Adding more quality control won't fix this, as the root cause wasn't lack of quality control. Attempting to do so will backfire, those people desperate for this will merely go out and create their own websites to hunt down the dreck that doesn't pass QC, and once they host it on a blog or whatever it will leak back into the higher quality sites (like has happened on IMDB in this article).
- deleted 10y ago
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gambiting 10y ago
If anything, Internet has AMAZING quality control, because any error has potential to be spotted by millions. Right this second there is absolutely nothing stopping me from publishing my own encyclopedia in print with random facts changed to my liking. It would just cost me money to get it printed, but it's not like it could get banned(imagine that!).

deleted 10y ago

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mangeletti 10y ago

I think the problems you're bringing up cannot be solved. Information (re: "Information Superhighway") is information. In this utopian idea of "quality control", who does the quality control? Houghton Mifflin[1]? If history is just a set of lies agreed upon[2], I'd rather have the consensus of the Internet than whoever it is you purport should be in control of quality. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/... 2. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968.html http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968....

GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
Not necessarily. The key problem is that primary sources are either in non-searchable hardcopy format (books, etc.) or inaccessible behind paywalls, making it impractical to do wide-ranging research outside of the academic libraries maintained by by large universities. It would take quite a major revision to copyright law but it's not impossible to imagine some future version of a library where one can search digitized versions of all known works and correlate between them.
alexandercrohde 10y ago
What are you talking about "cannot be solved"? Per the article "The only place that’s still entirely accurate is Wikipedia, hilariously enough." And for tvtome, "It was a user-edited wiki for TV shows. To be an editor for the big, popular shows you had to prove why you were qualified" Clearly there are systems that are much more robust against tampering than others. I'm sure dozens or hundreds of people came across this streets shark stuff on IMDB and thought "This is an error" but had no way to report it on IMDB. Wikipedia solves that problem (and in the event of dispute there's a full history).

NoMoreNicksLeft 10y ago

> However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. It's not a "lack of quality control". It's that the internet is data-starved. I'm familiar with how much data is recorded each year, and it seems paradoxical that we could still be data-starved, but it is so. Starving people/organizations ignore all the warning signs. They're desperate for what it is that they seek. The people looking for this bit of nostalgia want to be able to find information on it. Synopses, screenshots, and even videos. For these people, there aren't any substitutes. And the internet just doesn't have much on it (not like some Encyclopedia Britannica editor will have spent 18 months tracking down real information on this show). Adding more quality control won't fix this, as the root cause wasn't lack of quality control. Attempting to do so will backfire, those people desperate for this will merely go out and create their own websites to hunt down the dreck that doesn't pass QC, and once they host it on a blog or whatever it will leak back into the higher quality sites (like has happened on IMDB in this article).

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

gambiting 10y ago

If anything, Internet has AMAZING quality control, because any error has potential to be spotted by millions. Right this second there is absolutely nothing stopping me from publishing my own encyclopedia in print with random facts changed to my liking. It would just cost me money to get it printed, but it's not like it could get banned(imagine that!).