Wikipedia's flaws exposed and solved - perhaps

I found this article about problems with Wikipedia interesting. In this case the problems were caused by unvetted changes leading to embarassing inaccuracies staying around too long. However my experience of Wikipedia has been over zealous Wikipedia editors killing of Wikipedia entries willy-nilly just because they made some arbitrary judgement call about the relevance of an article. In particular two "religions" I had read about and been interested in the philosophical basis of found their Wikipedia entries summilarily deleted. That irritates me no end since Wikipedia, bless it, seems to have all kinds of fringe, obtuse and random junk in it - the decisions to delete articles just don't seem to have much rhyme or reasons to them.

In any case I think whether its article deletion or editing I think Wikipedia has a fundamental problem it will never address by more restrictions and tighter editing constraints. Wikipedia should embrace the reality that almost all information we read is subjective to some extent and make that a fundamental part of its operation. Without that the pages of Wikipedia will always just represent the current Zeitgeist of opinions on the topic, which may not even approach the absolute truth or encompass alternative minority opinions. Thus as a repository of knowledge or even a historical document for future reference it will fail completely.

No, what I think Wikipedia needs to do is for each topic support a continual branching of versions which are never done away with. Edits can be applied to the main version, or any of its branches and different "views" of Wikipedia can be applied which will change which branches are deemed "definitive". The views can be maintained by different sets of editors. So, say for political articles, there could be liberal and conservative views, and also a view that attempts to be objective citing reasoning, references, and other material used to determine the objectivity. Another kind of view would be the popularist view, determined by popular opinion. This is rather like what happens on Slashdot where comments are rated by readers and only those comments reaching a certain threshold of relevance are highlighted and shown in full to readers. Others are still there, just less prominent. This stops the mass babble of humanity drowning out the more interesting comment, but never stops the masses from deciding what is good and relevant.

Such a system would not prevent edits alleging a former assistent to Robert Kennedy was involved in the JFK and RFK assasinations, but it would quickly dissapear into the haze of minority views - they would no more be on the radar than JFK conspiracy is in everyday thought. Also given the number of such random edits that would appear (and surely do appear) most people would set some kind of filter that would make such minority versions invisible. If at time some sufficient Zeitgeist of opinion deemed it an interesting, or perhaps correct version of fact or history it might rise to prominance. Other versions would not dissapear though and multiple believed versions of "truth" could be supported.

Another interesting side effect of this system, and the clever part, if all Wikipedia users were able to vote on article versions one could start to do interesting analysis of how people vote and use that to automatically filter what they see. This would allow Wikipedia to categorize the beliefs of people supporting or rejecting a particular version of an entry. It would be rather like Amazon's "ant hill" production recommendation system that organically grows networks of information about what products you might also like based on your similarity to other people's preferences. So when voting for a version of an article on life on earth that emphasises "intelligent design" it could then adapt your viewing filter bias a creationist point of view. And if you prefer the scientific evolutionary theory version then next time you look up Noah's Ark it'll highlight the version that tells you its a quaint story from a big story book called The Old Testament with no scientific basis.

Of course the system will contain no absolute definition of a "creationist point of view", any more than Amazon.com maintains, say, a "downtempo drum and bass lovers view". It will just be defined organically over time based on the opinions of the systems users. So Wikipedia can become a different encyclopedia to everyone. Whenever we view a Wikipedia entry we can see a view based on our prior expressed preferences (I'll call it myWikipedia, the populist version based on the masses preferences (I'll call it ourWikipedia, and views deemed "objective" or "endorsed" by some defined set of editors. That latter objective view gives plenty of opportunity for creation of "Editions" of Wikipedia where articles have all been vettted and edited by a particular team (perhaps commercial) of editors. Thus Britannica could start going into Wikipedia and doing its thing and then if you pay a fee you get to see the Britannica edition or Wikipedia.

Such support for commercialization would provide both funding for Wikipedia, and validation of Wikipedia as a repository of some quality or repute - depending on who's version you view. It also offers opportunities for interesting stuff like censorship, age and country based filtering - just like the Internet itself has experienced. But by building that into the system itself from day one it would be a much more sensible approach.