web3 Wikipedia: how game theory & token engineering could solve fake news in post-truth internet era 🧵👇

Token engineering is the practice of using tokens to align economic incentives of individual actors with the desired outcome of the platform. In this case, our desired outcome is a factual encyclopedia of human knowledge.

Today, Wikipedia relies mostly on altruistic actors who voluntarily moderate individual entries, but the recent edit wars around the "recession" entry is a good example of this system breaking down. How might we use tokens to incentivize factual edits?

As a token holder, you have a financial interest in the success of the encyclopedia entry. Your incentive is to maintain a popular, high-quality encyclopedia entry that attracts new contributors and drives up the value of your governance tokens.

In order to edit an entry, a contributor would need to purchase an amount of that page's governance token and submit a "edit deposit" alongside their edit proposal.

Existing editors (token-holders) would have the ability to challenge new edit proposals. To challenge an edit, the challenger must stake their own token deposit.

For edit proposals that are challenged, token holders vote to accept or reject that edit. If rejected, the editor's deposit is forfeited and split amongst the challengers.

If the edit is accepted, the challenger's challenge deposit is distributed to the editor. By requiring some skin-in-the-game, this mechanism ensures high-quality edit proposals and high-quality proposal challenges.

his is not a new idea but simply an application of a concept called "Token Curated Registries" that have been pioneered by Mike Goldin, @simondlr, Ameen Soleimani, James Young, & others. Imo, a token-curated Wikipedia could be one of the most impressive applications of TCRs.

In case I haven't explained this well please take a look at this excellent intro article. https://medium.com/@tokencuratedregistry/a-simple-overview-of-token-curated-registries-84e2b7b19a06

A token-curated encyclopedia– let's call it TruthDAO– would issue a unique governance token for every individual encyclopedia entry. These could trade freely or be issued against a bonding curve. New token emissions reward administrative and maintenance tasks, as well as edits.