The Register keeps following all the trouble around Wikipedia: Who owns your Wikipedia bio?:

“It’s got the public playing the encyclopedia game,” he told us recently. “It’s also like playing a game in the sense that playing it has no consequences. If something goes wrong, you just restart. No problem!”

I think it won’t be for long until Wikipedia is locked down. It’s the only way out - there are too many vandals on the Digital Commons, and about zero chance they get caught.

The only real alternative I have encountered is the web-of-trust model, like Advogato uses which I gratefully copied for SqueakPeople. There’s a whole barren land here - web-of-trust webservices could offer their view on the web to anyone who uses it, and sites could decide to allow people who are rated in any of the webs-of-trust they trust. With all the pinging that goes on between websites these days, it’d be a small addition and would almost overnight solve spamming on wikis, blogs, forums, etcetera.

The drawback? If you are a total stranger, you need to get introduced to a community. Sometimes even by more than one member. But is that too much of a hurdle?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Digital Rights, In the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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