I’m an optimist. I believe that statements like “Bush went AWOL” or “Gore claims to have invented the Internet” can be evaluated and decided pretty much true or false. (the conclusion can be a little more nuanced, but the important thing is that there’s a definitive conclusion.) And even crazier, I believe that if there was a fair and accurate system for determining which of these things were lies, people would stop repeating the lies. [...] And perhaps most crazy of all, I want to stop repeating falsehoods. I believe the truth is more important than particular political goals, so I want to build a system I can trust. I want to know that when I make claims, I’m not speaking out of political distortion but out of honest truth. And I want to be able to evaluate the claims of other too.

What bewilders me most about Aaron’s proposal is his reference to Wikipedia as an example of how collaborative editing by ideological opponents can work. Aaron has contributed substantially to Wikipedia, but so have I, and I’ve seen quite the opposite. Wikipedia works best when dealing with uncontroversial subjects. In controversial subjects — for example, Mother Teresa, or George W. Bush, or anything to do with Israel and Palestine — it often succumbs to edit wars, with two or more contributors repeatedly reverting each other’s changes until one of them gets tired, or until an administrator freezes the article at a state that no-one is happy with. And to the extent any dispute is eventually resolved, it is usually resolved by making the article’s characterization of the dispute so exhaustive and so weasely that few people want to read it anyway.