Yesterday, I wrote an article claiming that a Digg like voting system could be used to solve Wikipedia’s problems.

Here is a working example of the voting algorithm implemented in Excel.Download file

Here are the key points:

• This solution does not require a Wikipedia editorial board
• All voters are treated equally
• The weight of a vote degrades as people edit the article
• More edits mean that the existing votes are more “fuzzy”
• Edits degrade the weight of both positive and negative votes
• The pace of vote degradation is adjustable
• The system does not need to store a total history - It only looks at the previous period

My guess is that it could be implemented as a simple AJAX tool, combined with a one line flat file associated with each article. If you wanted to add security, it might require a little more effort. I’ll see what I can come up with over the next few days, and, of course, would welcome any input or help.

Also, if anyone has a personal connection with the fine folks over at Wikipedia, and, of course, if you like the idea, I would be very grateful if you could let them know about this.