Democracy equals popularity

One of the reasons I love wikis so much is because I'm a strong believer that two heads are better than one. As much as I love the world of wikis through, it frightens me how someone can go in and just change something someone else has written. For my final project, one of my ideas was to have blog where someone could submit their writing pieces and other could critique them. But I enjoy wikis a lot more (for some reason they just seem cooler...) The problem with the wiki though is that I don't like the idea of someone else being able to change what someone wrote. I know that's why many teachers tell student to stay away from sites wlike wikipedia when they do research. I personally trust wikipedia more than I do other websites. So how democratic do I have to be when it comes to my site? Could it be more like MediaWiki wehere administrators have special serves.

Further on in the chapter of "infortopia" it discusses how Wikipedia has become more popular than the New York Times. I do not feel like this is a fair statement. As much as I love Wikipedia, it breaks my heart when I heart about the decline in  traditional publishing. Maybe it's the conservative in me who hates change but I feel like Wikipedia and the New York Times is hard to compare as far as both research sources and popularity go. As a research tool, I would argue that Wikipedia is better because of the speed of the search method. But if one is looking for an intellectual opinion over a certain topic, the New York Times is a better tool. If the number of visitors to each site calculates the amount of popularity, then Wikipedia would be the winner. Looks like the New York Times needs to become a little more democratic if they want to win this popularity contest.