The Web: never before has there been a medium where it was so easy to find so much information. And never before has so much of it been so wrong. Somebody needs to fact-check the Internet. But who? Dan Whaley thinks it should be you. Whaley is behind a Kickstarter project called Hypothes.is. With Hypothes.is, Whalen wants to tackle the problem of rampant misinformation by combining Web annotation technology with a reputation system and peer moderation.

Hypothes.is will work as a browser plug-in for Firefox, IE, and Chrome. It will add an overlay to Web pages with a heatmap along the side showing where people left comments. He wants to bring the best comments up from the bottom of most Web pages. People in the system with the highest reputations can up-vote the best comments and down-vote the worst ones. It’s like Quora or StackOverflow applied to the entire Web. Hypothe.is will let annotators and bloggers link directly to their comments, which won’t require the plug-in for people to see it (instead they will frame the page, which as its own issues). The project will be open-source and the Internet Archive will store a copy of all the comments. There will also be an open API in case developers want to come up with a better UI.

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.

12 Principles
#1 Open source, open standards.
#2 To the extent practical. Without consent.
#3 Sustained by social enterprise.
#4 Favor no ideological or political positions.
#5 Bottoms up, not top down.
#6 Influence based on track record.
#7 Credibility without public identity.
#8 By design.
#9 In systems. In governance.
#10 Infrastructure for 100 years? Or longer?
#11 HTML, PDF, video, books. News, blogs scientific articles, legislation, regulations, Terms of Service, etc.
#12 Remain humble.

Thanks TechCrunch