The problem with crowd wisdom is that it offers no chance for the outliers. I have one of my earliest trading experiences as a monumental proof that crowd wisdom isn't as half the deal it claims to be. I practically bet against pretty much every single expert 1 year ago when BCH (Real Bitcoin) forked from BTC (Blockstream coin) and I tripled my money. But when it comes to more general education, a collaborative exercise is the best way to go. I spend a great deal of time on Wikipedia to learn about many subjects. It was launched on 15 January 2001 and now the encyclopedia has millions of articles. I won't trust it to teach me about Tesla or be unbiased about the great Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax or sensitive matters regarding more recent assassination (accidents according to some). But there is a wealth of knowledge on science, technology, biographies, myths, philosophy etc.

The Death Has Happened

After FED was created it took about 1.5 decades to finally cause a real depression and it took almost a century to truly destroy USSA economy to a point of irrevocability. Great things take their time to fall dead. Wikipedia is mostly just standing on its old merits. I'm not just dropping these words irresponsibly. I am armed with facts and logic + Education in Economics.

Above is the number of active editors (>=5 edits/month) is plotted over time for the English language Wikipedia.
The research paper was authroed by Aaron Halfaker, R. Stuart Geiger, Jonathan Morgan and John Riedl.

Thinks have to be really bad from the inside if Time Magazine is getting into reporting it.

The Great Exodus

1)The decline represents a change in the rate of retention of desirable, good-faith newcomers.

• The proportion of newcomers that edit in good-faith has not changed since 2006.
• These desirable newcomers are more likely to have their work rejected since 2007.
• This increased rejection predicts the observed decline in retention.

2)Semi-autonomous vandal fighting tools (like Huggle) are partially at fault.

• An increasing proportion of desirable newcomers are having their work rejected by automated tools.
• These automated reverts exacerbate the predicted negative effects of rejection on retention.
• Users of Huggle tend to not engage in the best practices for discussing the reverts they perform.

3)New users are being pushed out of policy articulation.

• The formalized process for vetting new policies and changes to policies ensures that newcomers' edits do not survive.
• Both newcomers and experienced editors are moving increasingly toward less formal spaces.

Source: https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfaker/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline

Wrong Incentives And Fanaticism

The more I dig deeper into the culture of Wikipedia editors, the more it look like BTC Core or the related censorship and FUD driven subreddits of toxic elitism. Not all of them are bad. It's just a bad system that let the effects of bad individuals outweigh the effects of the good (even when good people are the majority).

Where does your Wikipedia donation go? Outgoing chief warns of potential corruption

The Reference Mafia + Gate Keepers

During the time I was learning how bogus the information on Nikola Tesla I learnt about how truth can be manufactured using a bunch of pages referring to various content. Then there is this article on The Washington Post which describe how hostile this gate keeping process is. No source is better than the involved first party itself. There needs to be consensus on what is self promotion and what is not. But one thing we can be sure of is that direct contact is far superior to some random reference.

But, it has a weakness. The site does not allow corporations, individuals or organizations to defend themselves transparently or submit information on their own behalf. This is a serious flaw and a real challenge for a site that has become a fundamental source for so many around the world. This policy results in many articles on the site that are inaccurate or even blatantly false.

I decided to provide a resource to the Wikipedia editors and help them get the story straight. I signed up as a Wikipedia editor under the name QorvisEditor. Under this handle, my goal was not to edit client or Qorvis pages, but to become a direct source from which established Wikipedia editors could ask questions about our company and work.

Within minutes of signing up, I was blocked by established editors for personally representing the interests of the firm — not for editing anything incorrectly, mind you. This action prevented me from having any direct interaction with any editor in the future, and thus prevented me from providing any first-hand information to any editor. This action also prevents any other Wikipedia editor from having a direct dialogue with the firm.

The Worst Looking Picture: The Mutilation of Wikipedia

Here is an article submitted by a Wikipedia editor who asks not to disclose his identity. One thing that I noticed while reading it was that Wikipedia has in a way faced issues that rhyme with the problems faced by Bitcoin. It's almost as if Wikipedia is a pseudo-blockchain project.

Wikipedia is huge but it is much easier to destroy than to create. It is much easier to strip away entire articles or whole sections of articles. At the current rate, in a matter of only a few years, thanks to editors like "HelpUsStopSpam", Wikipedia will be crucified. It will be reduced in size, but not streamlined and more authoritative but simply brain-damaged. Wikipedia's useful and helpful features will be gone.

Sometimes Wikipedia isn't really different from Reddit or even some of the unsavory individuals on STEEM blockchain.

I'm aware of this event. There is a mathematical proof. The article [DataMelt] existed on wikipedia for 10 years (120 months). It was a fine article, with many contributions. Never had any problems. In April 2018, 3 different guys contacted our admin, offering to improve it, or write an "independent" review to increase its notability (payment can be "later"). We never had such emails in the past. Still, assume 3 emails in 1 month is 1 event (since they did not act independently, all had emails registered in India). After we refused their offers, [DataMelt] was vandalized with 4 yellow boxes within the next 2 weeks, and marked for deletion. What is a probability that 2 independent events like these can happen within 1 month by accident? The answer - 0.008.

HelpUsStopSpam played a key rule - he was aggressive, did not accept any reasonable arguments, did not like 19 out 20 external references etc. Two other Wikipedia editors were helping him, it was very clear from the start. 4 editors viewed this article positively but, at the end, HelpUsStopSpam scared them away (even started to call one editor "spammer" who used somebody's id!). From his history, you can see HelpUsStopSpam does not really care about articles being notable. He does not even comment much on almost empty articles without any single citation. He strikes only when it is needed and/or beneficial for his pocket.

_Source

Everipedia - The Solution

I wrote one of the very first articles on the IQ Token Airdrop which actually made it to the top search results for certain keywords. I got a comment from @devilinlimbo which instilled a lot of confidence in me about Everipedia.

"My name is Angel, and I am the Executive editor and founding team member of Everipedia. I handle a lot of the content, and I work very closely with the team everyday in making Everipedia not just one of the best blockchain projects emerging, but also one of the sites on the internet. I am essentially the sixth member to have joined the founders: Ted, Travis, Sam, and Mahbod - I love them all to death. Now, that being said, we have been sleeping, eating, working, given our heart and soul in developing the finest wiki platform the internet has yet to experience. We have been at this for more than two years now - there's no way we are attempting the same thing as Lunyr... the last icing on the cake for us is developing one of the dopest blockchain projects ever! And it will be intended for Knowledge! If you want to see the vision, please take a look at the recent activity on the home page, and just imagine that being turned into a blockchain..."

Everipedia is a solid project. they have forked all the existing articles on Wikipedia and they are offering blokchain rewards for editing. this creates a system of self policing quality control while allowing anyone to contribute. I'm 100% positive that Everipedia will eventually dethrone Wikipedia from Alexa Top 10.

Bonus: Lunyr

They are starting from scratch and you can check them out at https://lunyr.com The stram of new content is very slow and there is a lot more to be developed. Here is their latest update.