On 4/18/05, Chad Perrin <perrin(a)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)