'How True is Truth? How Absolute?'

That headline is from a poem by Rod McKuen. (McKuen can be sappy, and he is a much-maligned poet ... but why do some of his lines stick in my head? Maybe it's time we look at his work again.)

Anyway, I thought of that line when I read about Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his latest idea, which I saw on  Slashdot.org:

While introducing the new World Wide Web Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee 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 web sites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources."

Berner's-Lee suggestion sparked a huge outpouring of responses at Slashdot. I'm sure Sir Tim's heart is in the right place, but this is a lousy idea. This country is so polarized right now, it would be a time-sucking disaster. And who would do the judging?

Trying to implement such a rating system would create such vicious arguments, it'd make the Wikipedia editing battles look like a little skirmish in South Ossetia.

I agree with this passionate (and funny) Slashdot poster. I'll let him have the last word, and I'll resist the urge to edit him. Or her:

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 stories...

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 on, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attacked?
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, or am I the only one?

And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot.