Matt R wrote:
I don't have any comments (yet) on your idea, but I thought I'd mention that cryptographic signatures would be overkill here, IMO: it's quite reasonable to trust the "history" function of a wiki to verify that someone wrote something, or "voted" for an article fork, etc.
Does the 'history' function maintain separate forks? I haven't really looked at it, but it doesn't seem to really jump out at the user. When I read a wikipedia article, I see only one text under a title at any given time. I can't choose between different competing articles.
What I am suggesting is something like this: when a user looks up, say, "Abortion", they are presented with a listing of high-rated articles to choose from, probably with a summary or something to help them make their decision about what to read.