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Wikipedia 2.0, Now With Trust?
USB EVDO writes "The online encyclopedia is set to trial two systems aimed at boosting readers' confidence in its accuracy. Over the past few years, a series of measures aimed at reducing the threat of vandalism and boosting public confidence in Wikipedia have been developed. Last month a project designed independently of Wikipedia, called WikiScanner, allowed people to work out what the motivations behind certain entries might be by revealing which people or organizations the contributions were made by. Meanwhile the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the online encyclopedia, now says it is poised to trial a host of new trust-based capabilities."
Plus, any kind of payment system would have people trying to game it, to the detriment of quality - if Wikipedia paid by the edit, they'd have people dragging out trivial changes through as many separate edits as possible, making the history tab practically unusable.
Whereas on the other hand, if Wikipedia were to pay by amount of content added, this would be likely to lead to the rather undesirable consequence that editors of the aforementioned Internet-based encyclopedia might pad out their edits through the utilization of wholly unnecessary verbiage, guided by the realization that this practice would vastly increase their character count and therefore result in a larger payment to be made to the editors in question, granting to them a larger share of their economy's purchasing power - considered by many to be a desirable state of affairs, and certain to in some cases override any aesthetic misgivings that they might otherwise have had regarding the practice of composing overly long sentences such as this one.