I like the idea of centralized repository for all human knowledge. Don’t get me wrong. It’s an awesome idea. Additionally I believe increasing availability of raw information is exceptionally useful to the trained eye. However, I cannot trust joe idiot to get up one morning and suddenly be an expert in the five or so fields necessary to document properly the “facts” of a given semi important subject.

Wikipedia is in it’s thrust a bad fundamental idea. What you need to do is stand back, and think of what at the core you are trying to accomplish.

I would say the core attempts here are…

Free exchange of information between many sources… (good)

Centralized repository of well cited factual information concerning many different things (or the sum total of all human knowledge)… (good)

A single brand that can attract many, and change the way the internet is used in research as in make it a valid citation… (good)

The problem is these 3 things cannot be accomplished the way Wikipedia is currently structured. You can’t allow final confirmed documentation of properly cited works and properly verified facts to reach publication and allow basically any jackass on earth to start up an article.

What we need is a system that appoints multiple counterpoints and professionals of relative fields necessary to the complete understanding of a topic within wikipedia. This pool of experts should be able to collective address submitted material, properly verify authenticity and accuracy, weed out improperly formed arguments and properly weight perspective arguments concerning any subject. This is singularly impossible to do with wikipedia as it currently is.

You need to allow the common man to submit information, but you cannot allow them to publish it.

And you need to properly audit the entire catalogue of works via an objective (sorta) third party.

Once you have that… you almost have a decent online work that addresses your core needs. You can’t have perfection, but you can have something close enough to it to work.

With technology we’re in 2007, with our minds we are somewhere before the industrial revolution. There are still many people who believe everything they read to be the truth, especially when they read that is is “objective”, “neutral” or “non-biased”. Therefore there are power-addicted people who take advantage of this. The head for the key positions in WP and of course everything they don’t like is “not notable”. It’s not “power to the people” that drives WP, but “power over the people” by limiting their view, especially when it comes to politics.

And speaking of cancer: WP is information chauvinism, which is no wonder because Jimbo is objectivist, which means the same. All kind of chauvinism are cancer: egoism, sexism, racism, specism, parlamentarianism, nationalism, objectivism etc. all in all chauvinism is the cancer of humankind.