winner of "BEST USE CASE OF POLYGON ID" @ ETHGLOBAL NYC 2023
the distinction between truth and falsehood (veracity) is of highest importance in any decision making. concerns over the ability to distinguish true from false information are acknowledged by many (e.g. "fake news").
an approximation to truth can be given as the reliability of the knowledge/information contained within the statement. reliability can be measured statistically in the predictive power of future world states given certain knowledge. e.g. the formula E=mc^2 more reliably predicts the future vs. E=mc^3, such that most people would consider the former more true than the latter.
human society keeps reliable knowledge in so called "white papers". white papers are summarized in encyclopedias. the best, but definitely not perfect, encyclopedia in current existence is wikipedia.
the goal of this project is to measure veracity of information transparently and democratically on web3.
given any information, allow people to vote the veracity of this information on a DLT (distributed ledger), as believed by this person. connect that vote to all DIDs disclosed by the voter.
e.g. a person might be a father and a biologist and a resident of NYC and a citizen of the US and a member of some political party and part of some professional guild and an alum of some uni and ... etc.
we can now check, on a frontend, what the average veracity of a given information is filtered any combination of identities. e.g. "how do professional biologists rate the veracity of Darwin's original paper?" "how do residents of my city rate the veracity of ?" "how do non-scientists in my country rate the veracity of the theory of general relativity?"
each person can judge for itself the veracity of any information. wiki3 allows this person to transparently see the judgement of other groups of interest to base it's own judgement upon. e.g. at a social event, i could claim that 99% of professional biologists believe that Darwin's main paper is more true than false, but how do i prove that? in lieu of a metastudy, wiki3 provides an efficient solution.
an id is a DID (decentralized identity). this project would allow different types DIDs as they evolve.
after the tech is implemented, an effort should be made to onboard various institutions. e.g. start with universities. given a university org chart, supply DIDs via the university email (also as mechanism of reissuance/cancelation). start with one high reputation university, which motivates other universities to follow. approach guilds. governments. etc.
this is a public good. society should invest into this project for better functioning of itself. just like Wikipedia editors work for free. we can incentivize participation with tokens representing contributions, allowing users to be proud and show off.
bounties for voting on specific information to be distributed to voters, regardless of vote, can be considered. the system staying unbiased is priority.
- keep it simple
- search bar for information (via content uri at first, later can add features to search based on actual content)
- filter bar to add identities that are combined (DID)
- given some information, vote