Well, on a technical level you have digital signatures that give you a technical way to verify that information from a given source has not been tampered with. Provided you trust that the public key used to sign that data did in fact come from that entity, of course, but trust has to start somewhere.
On a social level, you're right, people tend to introduce errors (either accidentally or deliberately) in information. There isn't a technical solution to that. But that's not the kind of transmission we're dealing with; we're only concerned with exact digital copies. Whether the source itself is an eyewitness account, a newpaper article or a wikipedia writeup, the goal is simply propagation of the actual digital document without allowing for the introduction of errors into the document itself. On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 10:20:55PM -0500, Len Bullard wrote: > Versioning yes, but also vetting and revetting of sources. The further you > get from original sources in any communication system, the more noise you > incur without adequate checks. Shannon 101. Names alone won't do it. > > I put a trivia test at my personal blog just for a "Do you trust Google and > Wikipedia" test. The problem is one of not starting from an authenticated > or original source. If you start from wikipedia to answer those questions > without the original source, you will get about half of them wrong or near > wrong. > > Modern Internet traffic worries about efficiency but typically the data is > short lived. If you live where I live you get to watch a fascinating > change: NASA is hiring as many sixty and even 70 plus year old engineers as > they can find if they have actual J2 series engine experience. The original > sources and digital systems failed to keep enough documents alive. They > have the designs but like the Canadians who tried to rebuild the V2 engines > for their contest submission, they don't know how to run them and it turns > out the devil is really in the details. > > len -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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