Should Web sites be rated for trustworthiness?

Talk about a thorny question, right? But the man posing it is no less than Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Web itself.

Speaking to the BBC, Berners-Lee said he was alarmed by how quickly wild rumors, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and urban myths can spread over the Web—such as, say, fears that the Large Hadron Collider might end life as we know it, or that Belkin is making a gaming controller for the iPhone. (Doh!)

OK, I'm joking about that Belkin thing (hey, I posted the denial), but Berners-Lee (currently launching a foundation to make the Web accessible to more of the world) clearly isn't kidding. From the BBC interview:

On the Web, the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable ... a sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.

So, his proposal? A new system (or set of systems) that would label Web sites according to ... well, how truthful they are—maybe not just "a simple number like an IQ rating," he says, but perhaps "different organizations labeling Web sites in different ways."

All pretty vague—and of course, troubling. Indeed, the idea would probably be laughed off the Web were it not Tim Berners-Lee who was proposing it.

Of course, the natural question (already posed by many) is: Who'd get to decide whether a given site is trustworthy or not? Would there be a series of "truthiness" tribunals, made up of experts in different fields? (And of course, experts are never wrong.) An algorithm? Or just a Digg-like popularity contest? And Web sites would be labeled ... well, how, exactly? A thumbs-up or thumbs-down badge? A numeric rating? A color scale?

So I open it up to you, dear readers: Does Berners-Lee (who, after all, literally invented the Web) have a point? Is he nuts? How would a labeling scheme work, and who decides what's fact and what's fiction?

Related:
Warning sounded on web's future [BBC News]

[P.S.: Back in the mid-90s, when I was goofy young intern at Wired, I ran a fact-check on a story that quoted Berners-Lee. I'd never heard of him, and (via e-mail) I asked him about a rather outlandish statement in the story: that he'd "invented the Web." Berners-Lee actually replied—and his response? "Yes." Man, I wish I'd kept that e-mail...]