The more time and energy that an Internet user has to expend in order to verify a piece of information, the less verifiable that information is. This gives us a verifiability scale . Some information can be verified at no cost at all. Some information cannot be verified no matter how much time and energy the Internet user expends. We will say that the cost of verifying such information is infinite.
Most information falls somewhere in between on the verifiability scale.
Second, this characterization suggests that the verifiability of a piece of information is static. For example, it becomes much easier to determine whether or not the guard is vigilant if we install a video camera to monitor her. I should note that increasing the verifiability of a piece of information is not the same as increasing the accuracy of the information. For instance, an author might insist on having at least two sources who corroborate anything that she publishes on her web page. Employing such a practice will certainly facilitate the acquisition of knowledge by increasing the percentage of accurate information on the Internet.