On 4/18/05, Chad Perrin perrin@apotheon.com wrote:
We already have Wikipedia and Wikinews. Do we have a Wikipinion? Perhaps this is the technical solution to the idea of a community-driven open-contribution collection of opinion columns. Where a given topic/heading exists, op/ed articles can be written by different people and the best-regarded among them for their clear and popularly agreeable presentations can rise to the top as the cream of the crop, as 'twere, by way of a voting/rating system. Then, perhaps, the top-rated article would be the first thing presented with explicit links to the next five (or however many) highly rated version and a catch-all link where a list of all of the versions might be located.
What you've described is much more the domain of the blog, not really a wiki. Probably the thing that comes closest are Scoop-based sites, such as Kuro5hin (tech) and DailyKOS (political), where the features are designed for the type of interaction you describe.
It seems to me like too good an idea to pass up, really, and if this community doesn't like it enough to implement it, I'm sure a community for such can be generated from the luminiferous ethere of the Internet.
Of course, I'm so busy as it is that if I end up having to create it myself it'll probably take three years to get around to it.
They do exist today, but usually the battle lines are drawn up in terms of polarizing left- and right-wing opinion. It would be interesting if a community could develop that would tolerate and engage in civil discourse given the vitriolic opinion pieces that tend to show up on these sites. I'm skeptical, but would love to be proved wrong.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)