I was reading an article at PC World about google’s new product “SideWiki“.  It’s basically a program which is an extension to google’s browser toolbar which allows you to put comments in to sidewiki but not in to the article’s comments feature.  This may come in handy for pages that don’t allow comments, but it’s not very good for those that do.  It also has its own intelligent ranking system which I guess we’ll have to see in action first.

The article was talking about the ranking system when up came this line:

It will be interesting to see how Sidewiki functions on controversial pages, such as those where a very vocal minority disagrees with the conventional view. Imagine the comments on pages saying that vaccinations don’t cause autism or that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

Excuse me?  Did I just read what I think I just read?  Did he just say almost every qualified and credited doctor and scientist, as well as the actual facts and figures, reality, is the vocal minority?

I really hope this isn’t true as it would be a huge blow to the sanity of this planet.  Has the consensus really become that lunatics such as McCarthy aren’t the vocal minority?  Have they really screamed and lied loud enough that now the majority of Americans believe their bogus claims?

I tried to sign up to point out to him in the comments that he got things a little backwards.  I wanted to tell him that in reality it was the antivaxxers in the vocal minority and not only reality but ALL scientific studies on the topic, testing, and a 99% majority of doctors and scientists agree there is no link what so ever.  Unfortunately though I could complete registration, trying to log in took me straight back to the login page.  If someone else can get further than please do comment.

As for SideWiki, I’m not that big a fan of it either.  Not only due to the interesting slant from JackOfKent in regards to libel which I never would have considered, but also I have personally had nothing but trouble from Google apps (well, enough that I prefer to avoid them).  Just as one can googlebomb search terms and SEO websites, this system is also open to huge amounts of abuse without a site owner/moderator being able to overview anything.