Ars Technica has an interesting article discussing the potential future of Wikipedia, timely due to the fact that Wikimania has been going since Thursday (it ends tomorrow). According to Yahoo! News, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales says the system needs to find a way to both protect information from abuse and allow open access.
Apparently one way to do this could be through “stable contents,” Wales says – pages that are frozen after their quality is deemed undisputed. Citing an example in which a Wikipedia user substituted a picture of Pope Benedict in April with one of Star Wars’ evil emperor Palpitine, Wales is obviously feeling pressure to increase Wikipedia’s credibility while simultaneously trying to give individual visitors the control that makes the system so powerful.
Having experimented with Wiki myself and even suggested it to prospective employers and friends as a way to facilitate communication between groups of different sizes, it will be interesting to see where this one goes.