The BBC in the UK has been interviewing Tim Berners-Lee, the effective inventor of the Internet. The news item is here. He's expressing concern that the Net is being used for rumour (or rumor in America) rather than fact and he'd like it repurposed.

Well, sure. But how in blazes are you going to do that? And isn't half the fun of the Internet seeing just how screwy some people's ideas are on things, whether they're demonstrably factually incorrect or just plain skewed?

There was a glorious American woman on the web a while back who used to put a regular bulletin (this predated blogs) about British culture and history. She'd discuss how the River Thames was where we used to throw our unwanted poor people, how the villages would regularly burn their mayors, how we actually had a history of indulging in cannibalism - honestly, she had a cult following over here, she was so far out of her tree.

But that's the risk of making a really democratic medium. You get the whackos and the plain misinformed presenting information alongside the experts. Yes, it means people have to do more sifting - frankly more sifting and fact checking than they actually do at the moment. That, though, isn't a sign that the Web needs fixing. It means that future generations, starting with us, need to apply more rigor in our approach to whatever we're reading no matter whether it's a jerk on the Internet or a poorly-researched journalist in a newspaper.

Now that is a radical suggestion.