Nice

[andrewducker]

Of all the stupid ideas to finish out the year with, the British government is considering age ratings for websites. I really do hope that this is the random thought of one person, rather than something serious.

Does anyone actually need me to explain why this is impossible?  Or ridiculously stupid?  Or can I take it as read?

Edit: I have nothing against self-certification. ICRA metadata is absolutely fine by me. It's just clear that it shouldn't be mandatory. Now, if it was _assumed_ by a "kid browser" that all sites were purveyors of filth, unless they self-certified as being porn-free/violence-free/etc. then I could live with that, because adults wouldn't surf with filters on. That's the only technical solution I can think of that has a hope in hell of working.

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I have nothing against self-certification

I disagree. Although it was put forward as the solution before, I don't think that self-rating is an adequate solution because it introduces subjective bias (my rating of my own site may differ from your rating of my site), and because there's no effective guard against wilful misrepresentation.

I'm slightly reluctant to admit it, but Cory had a point in his Metacrap article^*. The HTML meta tag is useless and irrelevant from a search and information retrieval perspective, because many site owners lie about the contents of their sites (by writing misleading metadata) in order to get more hits from search engines. A key component of the success of Google is that they've ignored metadata, in effect considering only what people actually do, rather than what they say they do.

* He's reacting to some of the early hype about the Semantic Web, but throws the baby out with the bathwater. The SW vision from the Tim, Jim and Ora article in Scientific American is unrealistic, but most SW practitioners (and some of its critics) agree that machine-readable metadata is useful in well-defined communities for well-defined tasks

[matgb]

I agree with this. Never trust what users say they do, or what site creators say it is, both are likely wrong, and they may actually be trying to be 100% honest.

[andrewducker]

Hmm. I think that porn websites (for instance) are generally very happy to say "We're porn!", and that children's websites would (if there was a whitelist of them) be very happy to put themselves on said whitelist.

It wouldn't be perfect - but I don't think any system needs to be _perfect_.