Rather than creating more wiki, the solution to creating a better Wikipedia is to create a system with less wiki. A large part of Wikipedia’s problems stem directly the “article” format of most wiki pages (and Fereated Wiki maintains the same page metaphor). This gives presentation problems in that it forces the web page to look like a book page, but more importantly, allows any editor to veto any content on the page. This gives rise to real or imagined experts believing they “own” the page, and from that groupthink, harassment, bias naturally follow. See my post: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
Sites like Larry Sanger's infobitt.com attempt to break down news stories into their facts, by letting contributors asses the factuality of each piece of information. However, I believe that fact checking current news stories is over-rated. Why do we need to fact-check the old story, when a more accurate news story will come along anyway? Again this stems from the wiki, formatting the page as an article, rather than, say, a stream of information.
There are other solutions that can mitigate problems that arise from using wikis, such as assigning anonymous editors to check content, and paying editors to contribute. I have implemented many of these on my site, Newslines (http://newslines.org) which crowdsources news, but uses each news event as the primary data type.
The absolutely vital importance of fact-checking current news stories, AKA "the old story", is in forming a measure of the reliability and veracity of the sources of this information, which can be factored in to future reporting.
Sites like Larry Sanger's infobitt.com attempt to break down news stories into their facts, by letting contributors asses the factuality of each piece of information. However, I believe that fact checking current news stories is over-rated. Why do we need to fact-check the old story, when a more accurate news story will come along anyway? Again this stems from the wiki, formatting the page as an article, rather than, say, a stream of information.
There are other solutions that can mitigate problems that arise from using wikis, such as assigning anonymous editors to check content, and paying editors to contribute. I have implemented many of these on my site, Newslines (http://newslines.org) which crowdsources news, but uses each news event as the primary data type.