| I am shocked this first version of an online encyclopedia has lasted so long. Typically first versions of software reproduce real world limitations, which don't apply to the software. Second and third iterations tend to drop them. Wikipedia has lots of those real world limitations. Notoriety and style of writing were determined by the limitations of shelf space and paper. The selected editor team is something wikipedia specifically wanted to get rid of but has bumbled back into over time. I keep expecting someone else to crate wikipedia 2.0, but so far nothing. Here's my suggestion for a better virtual encyclopedia. - Articles are cryptographically signed by authors. - Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles. - Articles have a unique and unchanging url. - Registered users can vote on articles. - Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those collections can be tread as an article. - Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters. I think based on the above you end up with human repository of knowledge. Where articles and links to articles are reliably unchanged, and you never have to worry about them changing "under your feet" so to speak. The same group of people running wikipedia now, can reproduce their own view of the world in the above setup, and their fans can use it. Any other group can also create their view of things. There is going to be one most popular view of things. But there could also be a one armed economists' view of modern dance filter of the knowledge pool. How to deal with spammer or trolls? In addition to voting and filtering, top notch text compression and time based moving of the least often visited articles to slower and cheaper storage. The slowest and cheapest storage we have, combined with how well we can compress text, in my opinion, results in almost unlimited capacity to store text. And thus notoriety should not be a concern. Leave that to paper encyclopedias. |
> Articles are cryptographically signed by authors.
This would significantly up the hurdle for doing edits and, given the meager popularity of PGP, not really pin down a person. But fair, I'd like to see that as a feature.
> Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles.
I don't see how this is different to a version history. For the most part, people just want the newest information; if a specific revision is needed, you can already direct-link to that.
> Articles have a unique and unchanging url.
Again doable via direct links. I see why you'd want to use that, but if I link (for example) my town, I want people to get the best info about my town and not that version I saw at that moment, unless I'm talking about edits specifically - in which case I'll link a revision. Of course, this requirement satisfies the crypto nerd in us, but it's really going against the usability here for hardly any gain whatsoever.
> Registered users can vote on articles.
Because that works so well for Reddit and all the other vote platforms. Or in science - see the replication crisis.
In all honesty, I think adding a popularity score into this is going to make things far worse. It'll just lead to repeating whatever happens to get votes, with everything else ignored. Why bother with the article of your town? No one cares about that, those two upvotes ... Let's go start an edit war over the birthday of a person!
> Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those collections can be tread as an article.
Fair, but that's nothing that wouldn't be doable as of now.
> Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters.
That'd be actually interesting, but I don't think it be worth the drawback of votes. Also, people which were set to that group or people which self-identify as that group?