Is the Internet getting smarter, or is it just ignoring stupidity? It could be a little of both if the founders of the StupidFilter Project have their way.
Gabriel Ortiz, a Linux enthusiast, and Paul Starr, a novelist and scholar, were tired of tolerating the stupid content that appears to be growing on the Web. They decided to fight back with an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. Termed the "StupidFilter Project," this tool is set to launch this month, January '08, and will give Web users a method for determining what content is legitimate and what is "stupid."
The source-code filter, intended to help users weed out worthless Internet content, can be incorporated into Websites, content
management systems, blogs, wikis, and the like. A fully implemented
Firefox plug-in and a Wordpress plug-in are also expected to come later.
So what process does this filter use to determine what is stupid? The StupidFilter will look for things that are characteristically stupid and weigh them according to how often they occur. Currently, hand-picked examples of idiotic comments are graded by moderators who rank them on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being least stupid, and 5 being most stupid. Moderators are told to be especially cognizant of the fact that they are ranking form, and not content. Eventually, the creators plan to release a core engine source
code for the filter, which will include weighted Bayesian or similar
analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection
engines.
As Ortiz put it, "A passionate defense of Britney Spears' status as 'The Queen of Pop' cannot be marked stupid simply because of the commenter's arguably poor musical taste." Moderators will look for punctuation and grammatical errors, excessive emoticon or acronym use, and pervasive misspelling, which Ortiz says are "the earmarks of careless composition or simple inability to effectively wield language."
From my perspective, there are a lot of stupid posts and a lot of stupid people on the Web. This should come as no surprise to anyone. If it does, you are probably one of those people.
Now, before you slam me for being insensitive, I'm not talking about your grandmother who just got online last week, nor am I talking about someone who struggles to communicate with English as a second (or third) language. I am talking about the people who, for example, post messages using a form of "stupid shorthand" to communicate. I'm referring to those excessive abusers of too many text messages and popular abbreviations -- from LOL (Laugh Out Loud) to BRB (Be Right Back).
I asked Ortiz about his goals for filtering egregiously stupid comments and the impact it might have on the Internet. "I'm really hoping that even with moderate uptake of this concept, whether or not my particular implementation sees widespread usage, this idea will improve the discourse on the Internet in general," he said.
Ortiz sees the StupidFilter Project as having something of a cohesive effect on the evolution of written English. "In my more hubris-filled daydreams, I hope that it will save us from a Tower of Babel type situation where incomprehensible Balkanization of the language occurs," explains Ortiz. As the project site reminds us, the Internet needs prophylactics for mimetically transmitted diseases (information corrupted by stupidity).
So what happens if the StupidFilter project becomes really popular and influential? Would Ortiz ever be tempted to filter out an ex-friend for being terminally stupid? "Our principles are to adhere strictly to form over content, so we're going to try to prevent any kind of bias," says Ortiz. "But if some kind of bias were to creep in, it's always possible for someone to fork the code and start a competing filter."
That's the beauty of open source, I suppose.
Out here in the ether, we have been treading water for years on a virtual "Sea of Stupidity." It is gratifying to see that someone is finally starting to build a raft to help us float above it all. This is a key trend that will become much more important as time moves on.
— Ken Trough, Social network moderator and technology expert
The idea is certainly innovative but i think the name is definitely inappropiate. I think the pioneers of this so-call StupidFilter or StupidityFilter as my colleague refers to it should coin a more appropiate term for their new product. Something can be grammatically correct and yet utterly stupid.
Whilst this will allow me to read coments without wanting to rip my eyeballs out, the best part will be the users who are unable to post thier comments and would say" Yo I tried 333 tiems to comemt and can't!!!! Watfxup??? How will this StupidityFilter rate this one??? I guess it would be 5.
First of all, filtering out content with "rampant stupidity in written English" won't make the Internet any smarter. However, geting the stupidity filter to work, to get rid of actual stupid or worthless content on the Web, will be a very smart and useful thing. It's not impossible to achieve, but if it doesn't work it will officially be known as the "stupid filter" rather than "stupidity filter" (StupidFilter Project).
Since stupidity is anything but absolute, the filter needs to be customizable and can be fine-tuned to a certain level as required by users as most of them would have different opinions on what's stupid and to what degree. This makes it very challenging and will require intelligence in the filtering algorithm.
this code sounds less like a stupidity filter and more like a grammar checker. Is there even a correlation between how people write and the value of the content? I'm not sure that there is. Seems like the only thing this will do is divide posts from old people from those from young people.
I think, saying there are a lot of stupid people on the web is just the same as saying ,there are stupid people.Well, because there ARE stupid people, and their quantity on the web is about the same that off-line. there is a permanent ratio. and it just has been moved on-line:).But we deal with it off-line somehow,so we learn to deal with it on line:)
Thank you for introducing the StupidFilter project to me. It seems like a very interesting project by two self-proclaimed elitists, which I'm sure will get a lot of attention once running.
I'm however not sure if I completely agree with Ortiz and Star's justification of the StupidFilter. There seem to be some issues they clearly haven't really thought about that well. First of all, 'stupidity' exists everywhere, and always has. Nevertheless there's no reason to assume that there's more stupidity in the online world than there is in RL (pardon my popular abbreviation), or that social computing enhances stupidity. The Flynn effect convincingly demonstrates that IQ levels rise with every generation, and I don't see emoticons changing anything to that. Based on the work of Steven Johnson, I argue that an initiative like the StupidFilter trivializes the level of complexity (online) popular culture offers. Ortiz and Star's focus on formal aspects might be more objective than an emphasis on content, it's still reductionist.
Second of all, the idea behind the StupidFilter seems to bypass the fact that language naturally evolves through popularized usage. That's how 'it is' became 'it's' and the British 'colour' became 'color' in American English. This development in language is self-regulating, but this does not imply that every popularization makes it into mainstream language. The purism of Ortiz and Star is of all ages, and in most cases is uttered by non-linguists. Whoever is completely against the 'degrading' of the english language by 'stupid' utterances might as well dress up for his/her appearance at the 'pre-Roman Britain' live action role playing party, where only pure English is uttered.
By the way: as if fancy capitalization (StupidFilter) isn't a clear example of "pervasive misspelling."
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