A Digg type tool can solve Wikipedia's problems
Wikipedia has been facing some credibility issues recently.
This is really easy to fix.
On every article, add a button that says - "Looks ok to me" and another one that says "I see issues here".
All registered users can click either button.
The results of this voting mean that each article can have a confidence indicator attached to it.
10 OKs and 5 Issues would give a 66% confidence rating.
If there are no edits since those people voted, then each vote gets a full weight of 1.
The value of votes degrades with edits. If you add information to the article, the vote weights only degrade a little. If you delete information, the value of past votes degrades quickly.
If a user finds an article with 100 votes and a 95 percent confidence rating, they know they can likely trust the article.
If users vote "I see issues with this article", they should be sent to a second page asking them to participate and fix the issues. If they do, they can change their vote to one of confidence.
It would be important to allow each user to have only one vote on an article, but to be able to change that vote as the article evolves. Something like "You voted OK, do you want to change that vote?"
