Interesting points, all. I took a seminar on Emily Dickinson, and, among many other things, we talked about the wars about her dashes. Some editors struck them out, thinking they were just handwriting ornaments. Some editors think they should be left in and think that they are the very essence of her work and that they mean certain things. One professor talked about some theory that the dashes lay on their sides, which shows a more lateral view (as contrasted starkly with the top-down hierarchy of Dickens, say, with God at the top and insects at the bottom).
Now that we have things like wikipedia to model ourselves after, the world of editing opens up, so it’ll be really interesting to see what happens when ALL of us (not just the people who work for prestigious publishing houses) get to decide what we read and how we read it.
I guess every wiki-ish community needs an elite of elders who decide what edits get to go in. They are the ones who get to decide that links to pride and prejudice fanfiction are out (because they belong in a fan discussion forum, not The Book Itself), but links to historical context are in (because they facilitate a better understanding/enjoyment of the book). It’s really difficult to edit something in wikipedia. My friend Peterson was just telling me yesterday about something mathy he found on wikipedia that was false (something about hyperbolic… somethings), so he tried to strike out the false sentence, but an editor said “where is your source?” which is a fair question, but math books only say the truth, not that something is not something else, so he doesn’t have a “source”, just a phd in math. So he gave up.
So yeah. I guess I’ve gone in a circle… even though it can open the debate up to be viewed by everyone, the decisions still have to be made by an elite. Maybe we can choose the elite, though, out of a wider pool of volunteers, and for reasons we trust. I guess that’s the thing. With the transparency of group editing, we will have to get “elite” editors that we have a reason to trust.