Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At a London meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium on 3 Dec 1997 he gave a talk that reviewed the early web and its initial development, and that also presented his thoughts about its future.

The talk suggested that every browser be equipped with what he called the “Oh, Yeah?” button. The idea was that everyone would build trust through signed metadata as they moved around the web; normal web browsing would create a huge accumulation of crowd-sourced credibility. In Berners-Lee’s words: “When we have this, we will be able to ask the computer not just for information, but why we should believe it.”

Berners-Lee’s “Oh, Yeah?” button would not be about verifying information or locating absolute “truth.” Rather it would suggest a more paradigmatic truth—that is, a reasonable approximation of whether something you read on the web was considered generally in the realm of credible by most people. The idea was an early warning that, in the future, the web would often be employed to fool people. Politicians, salespeople, criminals, miscreants, and liars would abound, and we would need an easy way to counter them in our daily perusal of information.

More Info: slate.com