The Internet is known as the “Infor­ma­tion Highway” for obvious reasons. The quality of infor­ma­tion, however, varies a lot. Some of the material on the Internet is very good, and some is of poor quality. A careful Internet user can easily make out the quality of the infor­ma­tion that he or she is accessing.

If, instead, some individual or group inten­tion­ally posts false infor­ma­tion of high quality, and makes it seem absolutely trust­worthy, then it becomes far more diffi­cult to sift through the wealth of data avail­able and decide what is true and what isn’t. Such a problem has occurred in a limited sense on Wikipedia, but the way its system works has so far prevented unman­age­able problems.

Perhaps this could be a form of IT terrorism. With networking technology becoming an integral part of human life, the Internet commu­nity should find ways and means of preventing the problem before it assumes a larger form.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 08:48 and is filed under Daily Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.