On: Collaborative startup specification: let the masses tell you what to build (so you know that you will have many users before you even begin)

Wikipedia isn't the right mechanism. It's fine when you're collaborating on documenting something that's completely objective, but as soon as you get into something controversial it descends into chaos. There's good reason that some of the highest-quality articles on Wikipedia tend to be the ones about math.

Darcs/git might be a better model for this sort of thing: everybody gets their own working copy and can merge changes made to other copies into their own.

Maybe you can use something like reddit for this purpose.

I suppose the sincerest form of voting would be merging others' ideas into your working copy. The system could track that and maintain a leaderboard of most-assimilated specs.

I see two challenges in this idea:

- to make a darcs-like tool intuitive to non tech types (lest you filter them out), and

- to represent such specs so the system can track them while keeping them palatable for humans.