There have been some recent stories about the government trying out the wiki model, the most interesting being Intelipedia - an attempt by the U.S. government at a collaborative spying resource. Now, the U.S. Patent system is getting in on the act.

The problems with such a system seem to be the same as with Wikipedia: reliability and security:

“The ability of a user to add content to a site is troublesome,” said Paul Henry, vice president of Secure Computing Corp. of San Jose, Calif. “In allowing everyone to add content, integrity goes right out the window.”

Hmmm. I guess it's probably obvious that I want to question this assumption. Yes, integrity changes, but "out the window" seems off to me. Considering the "integrity" of some of the information that currently flies into and out of our government (see Iraq War), I'm not sure a wiki-style resource would be anymore "troublesome."