I mean, I choose not to spend much time trying to edit it myself, because of these issues. But I use it ALL THE TIME to look stuff up. Don't you? And my impression is I'm getting at least as high quality information as from traditional print resources. I suppose it's possible I'm wrong, but we get into all sorts of epistemological questions there.

If that's the case, my statements are not intended for you. I'm not trying to convince happy people that they're actually sad. I don't want to convince anyone that something needs to be done. I tried to reach out to people who already believe that it's time to start experimenting with alternatives. For everone else, absolutely nothing needs to change.

Yes, I use Wikipedia every day. But that doesn't mean I believe we can't do much better (at least for a deeply subjective value of "better").

> Yes, I use Wikipedia every day.

When I spot an error in an article I do not ever bother to correct it, even if it is a trivial uncontroversial spelling error. I certainly would not attempt to change something that needs references, even if I have excellent references and even if the current error is unsourced.

That's not how WP is supposed to work and any wikipedian reading that should say that WP is broken, but plenty of them don't and are happy with the status quo.

If you want to fork, most information you need can be found here (wrt database downloads) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download . You might also want to look up http://mediawiki.org/ for the engine.

Voting on article versions could be a bit tricky. Can you come up with a voting system that wouldn't be gamed somehow? And how do you propose a voting system would counteract bias?

But most users don't see this. As a source of information, Wikipedia is unparalleled. There is nothing in existence that comes close.

So, it's difficult to say that Wikipedia doesn't work.

True, it would be more measured to say that some aspects of it don't work. Specifically, it doesn't really work all that well as a method of curating and incrementally improving content. That's because content is only a byproduct of what's truly happening there. Granted, it's a pretty awesome byproduct given the circumstances, without being facetious I would even say that Wikipedia should be considered one of the world wonders by right.

However, we're increasingly coming up against the limitations imposed by its horrendous culture. The reactionary nature of that culture will mean increasing calcification, and a high rate of actions that are net-detrimental to content quality [citation needed]. At some point, we'll need to move on and find better paradigms for content curation.

Very often people visit Wikipedia for a superficial overview of a topic they know nothing about - or perhaps to confirm a commonly known piece of trivia - which tend to be reasonably well curated.

For example, mathematical articles are often considered to be terrible because they miss this layperson target - they appear to be written by experts, for themselves. These are not necessarily people who are good at communicating their ideas to laypeople, nor even to other interested experts.

Wikipedia is not good for the long tails of research and expert knowledge - that's (for example) what research journals are for. I don't think Wikipedia could comfortably succeed at covering expert content while remaning so strong in its core.

Policies which I personally dislike, such as the poor culture amongst editors and pointless deletion policies, surely annoy me. But these may mean that editors who have chosen to contribute to Wikipedia focus better on creating the content which actually matters, rather than on infinitely long strands of esoteric knowledge.

For instance, it's not at all clear to me that a database of human knowledge could not do both - giving general overviews and provide in-depth information. Even Wikipedia kind of does both in a lot of places.

Research journals are not a good place for in-depth information because they're closed source and because they put too much emphasis on single studies (which are often wrong and need to be seen in the context of other evidence). The need for curated in-depth content is just as real as it is for high school-level summaries and there is nothing in principle preventing a wikipedia-like database from providing arbitrary depth.

It seems we have already taken a big step in this direction with the formation of Wikipedia, but for all the tremendous mileage already achieved it's a vehicle that doesn't seem to be taking us much further. Indeed, we seem to be rolling backwards and losing knowledge from the pool again.

Again, this is not a critique of people who are mostly happy with Wikipedia. It's a faint hope that something new will emerge from the midst of those who are not happy.

Wikipedia was not the only online/open encyclopedia, but it was the only successful one. To some extent online encyclopedias form a natural monopoly, and if that's the case then it's better that Wikipedia is it (rather than maybe Microsoft Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica).

But I think I agree with you: this space benefits from having encyclopedias with different goals and ethos. IMHO ethos used effectively to be how paper encyclopedias competed.

I, for one, would welcome a good competitor: do you have enough of an idea to execute something potentially successful? Even if I am optimistic, that's difficult to imagine.

I'm talking about introducing a way to measure this merit. So I apologize for the misnomer that confused you. However, I'm hesitant to call such a system democratic either, though that might be a closer match.

Ideally, I'd like to decouple ego and personality from the act of content creation as much as possible - to the extend that is possible while still motivating people to work on it. So you see why I might describe this as having democratic or meritocratic traits, without actually being a *ocracy.

I'm also open to the idea of such a system being distributed, which would solve another problem Wikipedia has. If that's feasible, you might even be tempted to use terms such as adhocracy or federation. My beef with all these phrases is they're describing forms of government, whereas what I'm looking for is more a mode of content curation.

But let's talk about actual substance instead of nomenclature. I don't claim it's a silver bullet, but I think those are some ideas that may be worth experimenting with.

I think its ruled by people who just have different views of quality than their critics. Since quality is highly subjective, but people are frequently very heavily invested with the idea that their vision of quality is universal and objective, its very common for people who disagree with a speaker on what quality is to be described as not caring about quality.

So Wikipedia driven by Stackoverflow's interface. Love it!