Gresham's Law, Wikipedia, and trusted currencies for truth on the Web

A few days ago I wrote about "Greshams Law of Information" where, given equal transaction values (ie Google links) then bad information drives out good. This is demonstrable on Google these days as it gets (i) gamed and (ii) all sorts of paid for or belief based sites garner far more links than the boring truth with their superior resources (and now, maybe (iii) allowing interested parties to pay for link manipulation).

I defined 2 types of "crap info" on the web:

Case 1 - Info that is largely aimed at flogging something (ie marketing/advertising), where nearly everyone knows its probably crap and ^will try and seek the truth
Case 2 - Info that is largely aimed at promoting a belief, where many people will believe so will "self filter" out any inconvenient facts - and in fact try and repress them

Now, in economic theory, "Thiers law" enters the cycle later on into any new ecosystem, correcting this imbalance for crap currency as one currency becomes the "go to" trusted currency:

For money, the argument is that, in the absence of legal tender laws, Gresham's Law works in reverse. If given the choice of what money to accept, people will transact with money they believe to be of highest long-term value. If required to accept all money, good and bad, they will tend to keep the money of greater perceived value in their possession, and pass on the bad money to someone else. In short, in the absence of legal tender laws, the seller will not accept anything but money of certain value (good money)

In that previous discussion I could see how Thiers law for Information will work for avoiding Ad-crap (my Case 1 above), mainly via social nmediation (recommendation sites for example) but I didn't work out how the Truth would Out against Belief Based Dis-information (My Case 2). Except for a small bunch of people who would pay a premium for the facts, I could not see a viable dynamic that woulld reverse Gresham's Law as the wall of self-interested money and time promoting crap is far, far greater than that promoting truth.

I did, however, forget about looking more carefuly at Wikipedia as a possible solution, but meeting Jimmy Wales last week got me thinking about it. In essence, the only resource as freely available and as dedicated to Truth that can counter the vested interests of crap-spreaders is a very large voluntary effort of crowd-sourcing, that creates a "trusted currency" of truth - of which at the moment, Wikipedia is the best example (Though I did like the advice to Marrissa Meyer given in joyoftech - see comic strip at top).

Which makes it all the more imporatnt to ensure it stays that way, as the vested interests are way ahead of me and have have already sussed that it is the Trusted Currency of the web, and know their best bet is to subvert it