hypothes.is: peer-reviewing the internet

Hypothes.is is an ambitious project to peer-review the internet.  The project was recently featured on kickstarter – and it successfully raised $100,000+ for the effort.  The site “will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review.”  Cool.  I think orgtheory already has a system for this type of peer review — readers and co-bloggers who aren’t afraid to challenge posts in the comments — but an open peer-review overlay of the Internet is ambitious.

The effort will inevitably run into lots of fascinating, epistemological issues: what indeed counts as truth, what is expertise (particularly when there are divergent opinions), how are disputes reconciled, the role of social consensus versus logic or proof, etc.  The effort should be fun to follow.