Wikigovernment 0003

The main reason holding me back on getting down to actually writing a wikigovernment manifesto is the great, big, obvious, staring-in-your-face question: “What if I’m wrong?”

What indeed?

What if not only am I wrong, but what if it also makes things worse?

This is of course entirely possible.

But democracy is a very example of how things political can go wrong, particularly with money and lobbying. I don’t know how far things can go wrong on Wikipedia, but I’m certain it has its own shortcomings. Other than reliability, perhaps the most obvious issue is vandalism. This ranges from silly pranks and hoaxes through serious defamation, malicious errors and lies, “revenge-editing”, deletions, posting fake photos, attacks on pages found distasteful, etc. And then there’s the problem of Wikipedia regulars becoming “owners” of certain topics and trashing other would-be contributors’ attempts to add their own input.

But there are safeguards, automatic reversions, bots and watchlists too.

It’s an imperfect system, but it works. It’s the go-to place for information on virtually any subject and overall it gets it right.