"Widely available, authoritative sources" is very similar to Wikipedias definition for reliable sources, and as anyone who been active there knows, the process is neither scientific nor reproducible. You can vote on it, you can form a temporarily consensus, you can elect people to make a decision for the community, but at the end its about convincing people through discussions. Naturally there exist edge cases where the conclusion is close to 99.9% determined from the beginning, like with spam and malware, and at the other end there is the small sliver of "common knowledge" that people do not disagree about (ice cream is delicious, kittens are cute, bad things are wrong).

Remove the discussion and give the power to decide what is truth to a company and what you get is the consensus within that company. Naturally that won't be fair, reproducible or representative. Give the power to governments and you get similar results, just with more police and military, through with the slight bonus of people being at least being elected. Still a pretty pointless exercise unless discussion and transparency exist.