Been thinking about this too.

Wikipedia is great for some things, but still prone to the political bias of editors. Some better game theory is needed to keep them honest & neutral.

Zaps / micropayments provide a possible incentive, but the danger of a simple zap reward (~ single upvote) is that it may encourage political populism on one side or other ("Trump/Biden is a dork" would likely get millions of partisan zaps).

Some kind of net up/down vote might be better - but this still fails to achieve balance on Reddit. Might work better on Wikipedia, though, given that it's not so divided into sub-communities?

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Yeah thatโ€™s the essential problem (people buying their version of truth).

Maybe an ideal UI would actually signal that i.e that there are competing, highly upvoted / zapped answers to the same controversial question

Yes, that might be one way (though many Wikipedia wars are over the titles and *existence* of articles, not just their content). There are several collaborative governance / collective intelligence platforms (eg Loomio, democracy.earth etc) which are trying to solve similar problems. Will be fascinating to see if frictionless micropayments makes any of them more feasible.