People Need an IQ of at least 115 to Post Online

There are a lot of creepy things on the internet. Idiots are sending out chain letters that still claim Barak Obama is not an American citizen. You would think that someone with an above average IQ (over 115 if we're talking about over 1 standard deviation) would automatically think these sort of things are bullshit. I mean look: he was a Senator before becoming President. Why weren't you all going crazy then?

But, this is not the topic of my post today. Idiots are running the internet and it is a horrible sight (no pun intended). Pages are being written by complete idiots, blogs are written by complete idiots, and news articles are written by complete idiots. There are so many things on the internet being written by a good deal of people within the 34% of the world with an IQ from 85-100. It's statistics.

My favorite example of the idiocy of the world is something I've run across recently. As an experiment, a few people I know changed a wikipedia page slightly. In this article, they claim that an acid derived from a flower is an essential part of soap products. They edited this February 20, 2010. As of October 26, 2010, that part no longer exists, but not because someone erased that small phrase they added to an existing sentence, someone took out the entire paragraph that edit was in. It took ten months before the blatant and unverified lie was omitted, and they removed it by accident. Obviously the people who patrol these articles don't know anything about what the plant does.

Recently, the Onion wrote an amusing little article that FoxNation published on their own site and touted as news. Of course, they gave credit to the Onion via a small link to the original presumably. As most of my readers will know, the Onion is a satire news source that comments on the goings on of the world through humor. In fact, for the Midterm elections, the Onion tweeted out tips for electronic voting machines, many of which obviously were bad ideas (one was something along the lines of "pay attention to the smudge marks to pick the most popular candidate"). When I had read the small article on this event, the FoxNation page was already removed, but still.

I have stumbled upon a small WikiHow instructing readers on the "proper" way to become a nerd. Now, I am a nerd. It would be fair to say a number of my friends are nerds. Upon reading this article, it was almost completely apparent that the authors (as it was a large collaboration of people) don't know anything about being a nerd. They kind of just assume things are what they are and then wrote it down. Someone claimed that hardcore computer nerds don't use Internet Explorer because it is "mainstream" and that nerds only use Firefox and Google Chrome because it's not mainstream and that it is improper to call those browsers by their full name. I have many problems with this. Someone else claimed that nerds dress up in expensive business suits. So do Business majors and most of those people would hurt you for calling them nerds.

This article was just so deluded and drew upon the stereotypes of every nerd v. jock movie of the 80's and 90's that the people who wrote this article wouldn't be able to tell you how the nerd was when they arrived on any school campus today.

• Firstly, nerds don't use Firefox and Google Chrome because Internet Explorer is mainstream, but because IE sucks. Also, IE used to have the most viruses because everyone used it. Now, the viruses have started to spread to other browsers, but the other browsers are also more user friendly and customizable.
  
• No one, in real life conversation, says "I use FF" because that sounds like you are on some new drug or perhaps you created some new slang for a pharmaceutical agent your doctor prescribed for your asthma, you fucking faggot. (No offense)
• Nerds aren't hipsters. We don't look for things no one uses and then say we are apart of a small collective and thus better than anyone else. We are the poor saps who alpha and beta test games for free because we worship the developers or the series. We have no sense of superiority over people beyond knowing the random shit we know.
  
• Nerds don't care what they wear. My friends think it's hilarious to watch the expression on people's faces when they walk into places with blazers on. That's their thing; not all nerds buy expensive business suits to wear.
• Not all nerds do the whole taped-up glasses thing. That used to be because people broke the nerd's glasses all the time and those things are expensive.

Being that this was a WikiHow, any attempts at changing the obviously outdated and hurtful information were useless and any decent information edited to the page was reverted back to it.

The internet is a horrible place. I'm not even talking about the popular imageboard that the news had demonized for a little while. I'm not even talking about all of the child pornography that has found a home on some off-shore server because it probably can't exist on an American server without some trouble. I'm not even talking about all of the sites that encourage people to make drugs in their basement - it's the internet. I'm talking about all of the lame-brained people who think they have the right to shoot off lies and untruths simply because they don't know any better. So unless the government wants to fund my crazy "Fact-Checker" program where I gather a ton of my friends who have tolerable or acceptable IQs, I think it should be mandated that people with an IQ of at least 115 are the only people who are allowed to publish text and essays and articles on the internet. I'm not robbing the internet from any of you.

What I'm suggesting is that there should be a group of people who know their shit and who will be willing to get paid to go through the Wikipedias and the wikipages of the world and fact check those as the first stage of this mandate. After those have been done to an appropriate and tolerable level, new information will be written by these intelligent, smarter-than-average people. Everyone else can still post on forums if they have problems or if they want to whine about their closeted boyfriend named Ember. Forums, imageboards, chat boards, video game chat rooms, etc. are for everyone who want to discuss related things. Online documents and articles will be written by the truly intelligent people who will be paid to research and write.

This will apply to blogs too. If someone wants to talk about all of the sex they are having, go ahead. That blog will be listed under the general blog directory for anyone who is interested in that sort of stuff. If someone wants to read about an opinion regarding politics, everyone can write those. The people who write those with IQs over 115 will simply get their own directory for an "informed opinion on politics" because I simply won't tolerate nut jobs who believe the Congress gets off by hiding stuff from us mixed with the literate and well-read bloggers who really tell the story. I've accounted for the people with crazy high IQs and are also conspiracy theorists. Those people will be listed in their own little directory (as they are only a very small fraction of people) and mostly left to do whatever they want.

It is a sad world when anyone can go online and write something and someone will think it is good or true or undeniable. No one caught that fairly discreet untruth on that Wikipedia page, and if no one changed the format, it would probably still be there today. The internet was created as a means to share information. How can we share information when every other user-contributed thing is false or obviously not as good as it could be and the people who patrol those pages won't let a change be made? The internet was created as the network to collaborate ideas and pornography. I guess one out of two isn't too bad.