Rise of the wikicrats

What will the next generation of social content look like then? Personally, I think the next "big thing" will be trust metrics. Wikipedia's challenges could be solved by a trust matrix.

If users were given trust values (think eBay feedback, but a bit smarter) and then users could in turn rate articles, that would at least partially solve some of Wikipedia's biggest criticisms (the content is unchecked and liable to spam / abuse).

Trust networks like that scale exponentially with the number of nodes (users and articles) so I suppose it would significantly increase the resources required to host something like Wikipedia.

Someone could do us all a service by presenting a talk called "A Practical Guide To Avoiding Internet Drama on Your Service" and offering advice on structuring discussion, interaction and administration to avoid problems like this.

My #1 suggestion: if you must have an "off-topic" forum, make sure it's clear that it's not the "no rules" forum.

So many startups gunning for Google; perhaps some should be gunning for Wikipedia -- which I love but seems at risk of retreating into paranoid orthodoxy in response to scaling and spamming threats.