Can we put Wikipedia under STEEM?
What if Steem is used to keep a database of articles that are continuously altered by the community? A Steem based Wikipedia.
1. the situation: Posts with uninteresting general information
When I look at the posts that appear on Steemit I see a lot of posts of people just giving a description of any general subject that might be popular or interesting, but without any relevance at this specific moment. Clearly some people are hoping to make a buck with a general descriptive post, for e.g.
Post titled: Leonardo Di Caprio
or Post titled: The roman empire.
These posts are clearly a copy/paste of another website posted with some non-original pictures.
Since the information doesn’t add any new information to what you can find on the internet, my first reaction is:
Not interesting
No upvote
But then...
2. Second thought
There is a lot of debate going on about how Steemit could evolve and how Steem could be used. So I gave it a second thought.
Maybe these general posts could give some added value in the future but not in the sense of how Steemit works today.
Steemit today is basically a forum with original posts of individuals and the reactions or appreciations of other individuals. The posts come in, generate some fuzz, some hilarity – sometimes an interesting debate – and then they fade out (hopefully after gaining some value).
But this model doesn’t work for posts with general information that should last longer, maybe years.
3. Three problems with these ‘general info’-posts
- The information could be false, or not accurate. The post is still the ‘opinion’ of just one individual
- The post does not get updated unless the guy who posted it will do the effort to keep it all up to date. It’s hard to rely on this principle.
- Posts on the same topic can be posted on and on
4. Solution?
What if you can make posts that can be changed/annotated by other users? So instead of posting reaction to the post, you allow people to change the text itself, just like in Wikipedia. The upvoting system can of course be used to give your appreciation of a text, or to like or dislike a annotation that has been made.
Just like Wikipedia a community will have to check information, some people will need to have more rights in approving of disapproving information that is added or deleted.
5. Problems
I bet there could be some major problems to implement this system, but I have no clue about what’s going on under the hood of Steemit. So I am leaving this to you guys.
