I have another little project ongoing, it’s the Knowledge Captcha.
What is it?
Well it is an idea I got as I grew sick of people reading preprint online without having the basic understanding of what a preprint is and claiming to have read the absolute truth. The discussion can be extended to basically all scientific research access.
I am for a mechanism, the Knowledge Captcha, to advise and screen who is actually accessing scientific information. I am all for an open free access, rest assure of that. What I am talking about is a mechanism that works like the reCaptcha now, that is before the access to any scientific content (pre prints, scientific journals etc) and avoid Mr John Doe to get immediately something he has no scientific basis to understand. Because the risk in these cases is that Mr John Doe, the Karens and all other who ‘learn from the web’, misunderstand things and concept. It will be, hopefully, a sort of assessment via captcha of the background of the visitor.
It will save from crazy access and from crazies to access knowledge without being advised they do not have the enough cultural background to get it.