Very perceptive analysis and an elegant (albeit not very counterintuitive, right?) solution to Wikipedia’s woes: jettison it’s egalitarianism…
The thermodynamics of Wikipedia || kuro5hin.org
I thought about Wikipedia as a thermodynamic system. Some conclusions based on this trivial investment in the model: 1 even if all users are sincere, theres no asymptotic progress towards correctness and accuracy beyond a certain point, 2 every article, even good, well-written articles can go bad over long enough time scales, 3 restricting who can edit an article can help, and 4 asymptotic progress can be achieved through something similar to simulated annealing.