Design
From Fisheye
Contents |
Goals
- Design must be informed by Prior Efforts at web annotation systems.
- Easy to use for those who wish to have criticism embedded, and for those who wish to contribute to the database.
- Not be tied to specific sites. Rather people should be able to submit criticism on any arbitrary URL, and from any source of commentary.
- Non-partisan, focused on completeness and correctness, not arguing a viewpoint. Features such as tags, filtering, ratings, and trust can be used to minimize that type of noise.
- Users should be able to control which sites they see criticism for. Should be able to control which sources of criticism one sees, to avoid critics they don't wish to read or disagree with. Also filter which types of criticism are visible, perhaps with an overall "severity level" ala browser security - may not wish to have supplemental info and differing opinions cluttering up pages.
- Embedded criticisms need to be apparent, but also tasteful and undistracting.
- Users should be able to control how criticism is embedded, eg highlight and/or footnote format, switch icon sets, etc.
- Link to essay services.
Scope
Although the technique could be applied generally to leave comments, limited to criticism of online publications.
Try to avoid partisan bickering and stick to more objective issues. Valid criticisms from all corners are welcome. Hopefully there can be an "agree to disagree" detente as in wikipedia, where factual issues are carefully stated and opinions are identified as such.
Although fisheye accommodates links to differing viewpoints, fisheye itself is not a platform for debate. Comments-on-comments-on-comments should be disouraged or impossible.
Overview
Components
Fisheye comprises the following major components:
Database - holding data submitted by users linking commentary to stories
Client- browser plugin and/or proxy which embeds the criticisms into web pages as they are viewed
Web Interface- for submitting and managing data and accounts
These components should be modularized and well designed. It should be straightforward for anyone to write a client which draws data from the database. Criticisms could be submitted by a web page or browser plugins, or imported from another database.
It seems very likely the server/database component will be Annotea. The probable first client, derived from Annozilla, will also support submitting data. It may not be necessary to build a web interface for submitting and managing data and accounts.
Categories of Criticism
types of criticism from strongest (challenging veracity of source) to weakest (providing complementary or supplementary information):
- factually incorrect statement
Commentary should be purely factual, EG encyclopedia rather than a comment in an essay.
- logical fallacy
- contradicts an established source, no justification for contradiction
- dubious or false assumption
- unchallenged quote
- misleading statement (same as lack of context?)
- lack of context
- bias in presentation / takes sides (burying opposition or quotes one side of debate more extensively)
- loaded terms
- selective information (cherry-picking of statistics)
- contradicts another source (non-pejorative, other source is no better established)
- projecting motive / mindreading (suggesting someone did something for a certain reason, when all that is known is that the thing was done)
- suggested reading
- link to other relevant information
- link to opposing viewpoint
- links to other stories on topic
