the contingency of truth

i've been thinking recently about the role of truth on the net, specifically related to search engines and wikipedia.

This sort of harks back to my 3rd year philosophy days reading Richard rorty's "Contingency, irony and solidarity" that (whether intended or not) always made me think of contingent truth as a layer of tectonic plates obscuring the real and uknowable truth below.

That sounds like a load of shit, but the image makes sense to me.

Reading an article on some guy who had been the victim of character assasination via wikipedia. (the bloke had been the subject of an article saying that he was involved in the shotting of jfk).

also got me thinking about truth on the web. the blokes entry was edited after he complained, but only because the editor thought he knew that the original entry was not accurate. he thought he "knew" the truth.

Wikipedia to some extent does rely on a democratisation or herding of truth. if i edit the entry on bill gates
to refer to bill gates as a wanted paedo the majority of readers will believe this to be false and the entry will be edited. In this way the "truth" is maintained by the democracy.

But what if i was refering to another bill gates who is a wanted paedo, my truth will have been trampled under the majority understanding.

Where am i going with this? well ages ago i thought about creating an online community whereby people voted on laws and values for the society. thinking baou this again in the context of what i've written it would be interesting to apply the principal of a community votng on the truth.

users could put forward propositions (the earth is flat true or false) then users could vote on them.

eventually a whole contingent truth could be created by people putting forwards and answering propositions. the truth would change over time as well, users could see what was last weeks truth, how does it differ from last years, what is users x's truth.

it would be interesting to see how things change over time. especially related to current events
would the answer to "the war in iraq is wrong?" be different now than it would have been 2 years ago. would certain demographics be more inclined to vote a certain way. if we captured user demographics (although aslo allow non registered users to vote) it migth be possible to see regional variations in truth.

quite a few possibilities from a pretty simple idea.

this will probably bee added to the long list of fiddled with and then gave up ideas.