What do you think about web democracy in the form of online

polls ?

Ick. And double ick. I cannot imagine a voting process doing anything but institutionalizing mediocrity. The anarchy is precisely what makes Wikipedia effective at creating content. Why do we want to cripple what it does best? If we want to create a product that is clean and well-organized, let's do that too--as a separate, but releated project, using the Wiki-created content or some subset thereof. That's the purpose of the FDL, after all--to ensure that the content will be usable in whatever other products we or someone else might imagine for it.

What we might want to do is make better facilities for metadata, including ratings and evaluations of pages by various people, then allow users to narrow their searching and browsing to pages with certain evaluations. But let's have each person's evaluation of each page be recorded individually; if the criterion chosen by a viewer is "majority approval" or some such, then that's OK for that user; but others should be able to upgrade or downgrade articles based on evaluations by individuals or other processes. 0