If you improve on it with a modified approach, buzzdenver, I'm sure many of us on HN would be happy to give you feedback.
Idea: pull requests, but for essays.
Wasn't that sort of what medium was pushing originally?
Was it? Not sure. It's too new-agey and commercialized for me, so I never checked. Blogger and Jekyll-github all the way! Perhaps if someone leveraged those technologies well, you actually would have source control for essays.