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.