I find Wikipedia fascinating.  Anyone can edit — how could that possibly work?

Of course, there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about the accuracy of Wikipedia articles.  I think Wikipedia is pretty accurate, if you look a sort of content average over the long term.  Inaccuracies in any given article will get corrected by the crowd over time (but with new inaccuracies added).  In other words, any given article has “inaccuracy noise” over time, around a mean (or accurate) “value”.

I think democracies work like Wikipedia articles.  At any given instant, something’s “inaccurate” (e.g. broken, dysfunctional, etc.), but the system works pretty well if you consider the average results over time.  It’s the wisdom of crowds at work.

So the question is:  how much of a content cleanup will the 2008 elections be?  (And that’s as political as I’m going to get in this blog).