Re: Nigel Williams from childnet intl on ABC Media Report)

Michael Baker (mbaker@pobox.com)
Thu, 23 Oct 1997 22:31:38 +1100

At 02:20 PM 23/10/97 +1000, Danny Yee wrote:
>Irene:
>> Pity there's been no response from the ABA reps. So I'd suggest... flitting
>> around the world, as if there's no better use for taxpayer funds, liaising
>> or something with other government bodies in planning a "global" rating
>> system with subsets for each country. Global?
>
>It would be nice to see some concrete results we can discuss, instead
>of vague "the ABA is working with international bodies to develop blah
>blah blah".
>
>I'm still trying to work out how the "country subset" thing would work.
>Less than 5% of the visitors to my web pages are from .au domains... I'd
>guess that 70% of them are from the United States. So whose "country
>subset" would I use if I were to rate my pages?

This is speculation but I think the idea is that pages are classified
on an "objective" basis, on several scales. For illustration these
might be scales of 1 to 10 for language, nudity and violence. The
numbers are universal because they are "objective". The country
profiles then use this "objective" information to deliver a
country specific rating for each page. Profiles could be like
the following:

Country A

rating level language nudity violence

A <= 2 <= 0 <= 1
B <= 4 <= 1 <= 2
C <= 5 <= 2 <= 3

Country B

rating level language nudity violence

G <= 1 <= 2 <= 3
PG <= 2 <= 4 <= 6
M <= 4 <= 8 <=10

However I'm convinced it won't work, even with country profiles.
BTW US news sites have recently decided not to rate their sites.

I'm still debating with myself if it would be worthwile developing
a mathematical proof of the impossibility of developing a useable
universal rating content system.

Michael.