How to fix Wikipedia

Did you know that Wikipedia is broken? Well if you listened to the chorous of people saying how unreliable, incorrect and generally bad Wikipedia is you might believe it. Then again for the average person on the Internet Wikipedia looks like an omniscient god-send as a first base for researching things. To me, raised on the scientific method, knowing how Wikipedia was created and how it is maintained I'm fully aware of its problems - I'm willing to take it all its information with a grain of salt. But I realize that not everyone is so well informed as to Wikipedia's failings.

The real problem is though, not that Wikipedia is incorrect in places - how ever many that may be - but that even if it was objectively correct in every way, researched and tested to the highest degree beyond perhaps even what a "well respected" document like the Encyclopedia Britannica might be, even then people will dispute its contents. Mostly the problem is that "truth" is largely a subjective notion. People either just believe other people's "truths" - facts presented to them as "true" by others, or try to derive their own truths based on their own interpretation of "facts". Consequently what is regarded as "true" and encyclopedia worthy information is going to vary from person to person.

Some people try very hard to research, cross-reference and document the origin of the facts the present but as time passes, and knowledge becomes second hand that is more and more quite impossible. Indeed if Wikipedia were to present only information backed by that highly cross referenced and researched information it would a) probably not contain a lot of the information it contains now, b) be largely useless to the population at large who just wants a quick low down on a topic.

My suggestion is - let it be. Wikipedia can continue to be what it is - a big global repository of information - but it should cease to be, or pretend to be, some single definitive arbiter of "the truth".

How can that be?

Well day in day out people are submitting edits and new articles to Wikipedia. Day in and day out editors are hard at work mostly moderating that information to conform to their notion of what "good information" and "correct information" is. Maybe we should just remove the editors and let the information be free.

"Okay" you point out, "wont that just result in the happy slander/free-for-all graffiti wall that other open forums turn into?".

Well, yes it would except for one detail - I suggest that somewhat like the Slashdot and Digg community methods, Wikipedia add dynamic filters that filter what you see for each article based on who you trust. It should also maintain all edits as their own branches of the big bad information tree independently so everyone can see the information just as they want it - if they want to. All minority opinions can be maintained and viewed intact by those minorities, but the majority opinions will dominate and be virtually impossible to subvert by minority doodling, graffiti or "griefing" as it is called in Second Life.

It is my assertion that pretty soon after creating such a system the ability of self-trusting mobs to create majority versions of Wikipedia articles will dominate. Yes for some articles there may be two, three or even more major branches in the information tree yielding radically different versions of articles - and each of those may have many, many minority branches. But because we would each select who we trust as arbiters of truth (rather than self elected arbiters of truth making that selection for us) we would only see those opinions that are important to us. Even better no information would be hidden - at each point we would be alerted to and able to view any of the other versions of the document. Further more the trust circles and communities formed by authors and writers of documents would self define reflect all the major belief systems and philosophies we already have in society.

One of the major branches would naturally those people who seek to find a very objective and factual version of information (that would be "scientific") - that would be the version I would select as my "default" view for Wikipedia. Others might select a "mystical" or "spiritual" view. Or they might select "scientific" plus a few variation in certain places. Or they might select just based on what some well respected peer of theirs has deemed to be their view. At each point in the Wikipedia experience I would be able to make changes myself and rate with my "trust" other edits.

Beneath the surface of majority views many more minority opinions would certainly exists and flourish - perhaps bubbling to mainstream over time, who knows what mob rule or time will bring?

Well, that is my idea - in essence Wikipedia can be all things to all people as a real "tree of knowledge" and better for it. Everyone will get what they want, no information will be edited out of history, just buried into obscurity - rather like ancient ruins. Best of all I think with the editing history that is maintained by Wikipedia we could probably go back and reconstruct a genuine tree of knowledge instead of the well edited slice of knowledge that it is now.