vocab idea: SatiricalArticle

(disclaimer: thinking out loud)

A smart-enough-to-know-better friend who shall remain nameless just
re-shared this link, having given it a quick check over (by searching)
and it looked real enough. At first glance it was Onion-esque but
wasn't obviously one of theirs, so got re-shared:

http://www.freewoodpost.com/2012/03/13/mitt-romney-i-can-relate-to-black-people-my-ancestors-once-owned-slaves/

The article is completely false, as
http://www.freewoodpost.com/disclaimer/ indicates.  If you view
source, you see itemtype="http://schema.org/Article" though (and a
load more metadata, ogp etc).

I was wondering whether an addition such as
http://schema.org/SatiricalArticle could ever get traction.

My initial conclusion is 'no', ... since most of the obvious
applications of 'SatiricalArticle' would likely slow the viral spread
of fake outrageous news around the Web, and so get little support from
publishers like the above, or
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/ http://christwire.org/
http://www.theonion.com/ http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ etc. But you
never know, there might be some other incentives (e.g. disclaimers?)
that could support such an idea.

So I thought I'd float the suggestion. If anyone here happens to know
such publishers, I'm curious of their perspective. Would a
machine-readable indicator of 'satire' be interesting to any of them?
Presumably they get much of their traffic from controversy caused by
reposting shocking "news". Of course there's always scope for that
same metadata to be created by third parties, but that's an old old
story (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-labels/ etc).

cheers,

Dan

Received on Sunday, 29 April 2012 20:44:08 UTC