Something that agrees with my last post, Dave Winer says: "It's not really Wikipedia's fault, it's the way online communities evolve where everyone has an equal voice."

Exactly. There's no moderation system in a wiki, it's a free-for-all. An improvement on a collaborative website could:

- Identify people who have expertise or knowledge on certain subjects.
- Prioritize these sources of information over other sources for that subject.

Then in the pool of the remaining non-"experts" you would have to seperate:

- The careful researchers who find and submit factual information, even on subjects where they are not experts.
- The sloppy people that don't know (or don't care that) they are submitting garbage.
- The saboteurs, who intentionally want to reduce the quality of the site.

Push all of that into a moderation scheme and you've got something more reliable than a free-for-all wiki. The experts get more of a voice and the saboteurs get much less.

The downside is that it's likely to be far more complicated and that reduces the barrier of entry, which in turn reduces the number of people that are likely to collaborate.

The upside? Like I mentioned before, Wikipedia has already paved the way. People will be more likely to collaborate now even though it's more difficult because:

1. They already have seen it work on Wikipedia. They know the benefits of submitting: that their work won't go to waste and will be enjoyed by others.
2. They also know they'll get credit for their submissions.

Wikipedia was never very good at crediting people -- credits are shoved in the back end with the edit history. This makes almost every Wikipedia article effectively anonymous. That in turn reduces an individual's personal responsibility to the facts because it's difficult, though not impossible, to trace errors to specific people/users.

If you insert some personal accountability measures into your new collaborative website, all of a sudden quality improves. Imagine that. Sometimes it's as simple as putting people's names on their work, like Everything2 does.