Wikipedia accountability problems; competing accrediting agencies

[gusl]

Wikipedia hate: the problem is that no one is accountable for the content of the articles. There have been cases of people getting slandered, who could do nothing about it.

The Wikipedia badly needs a reputation system (which writers/editors do you trust?) or an endorsement system (which reviewers do you trust?), but preferably several parallel systems.

Once people become accustomed to the notion of different accrediting agencies, the world would become a much better place. I believe that much evil comes from monopolies in rating, which leads to a greyscale view of things, e.g. you only get 1 grade for each class, and lots of relevant information is kept off-record... when we have competition between raters, they will have to become smarter and less biased, their ratings will be more meaningful and will better reflect the bottom line.

My hope is that this will lead people to make smarter decisions about politics, hiring, etc. You can say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Comments

[breyten.livejournal.com]

A reputation system is overkill for Wikipedia right now. They've already disabled that anonymous users can create new pages. The obvious next step is to disable editing for all anonymous users, which they'll most probably do within the next three months or so. If then the problems continue, then it may be necessary for such a system, but right now there are more low tech methods to deal with it, which are also effective.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

An endorsement system to deal with biases, article quality, preferences about article styles, etc. could do a lot of good right now. And there's no reason why it would need to be done within the Wikipedia... outsider ratings would work just fine.