Excellent project idea. This punches right into epistemology - which is how we know what we know. It'd be great to either be quite opinionated about your epistemology, moreso than the article above outlines, or be a bit more agnostic about it and allow users to set things.
A big part of consensus forming is in communities of discourse - that is what that community talks about, what they assume to be true and how that community tests new information. This matter because different disciplines have different ways of doing that and for good reasons. For example, the scientific method is great for many things to do with the observable world, is somewhat okay for social questions and terrible for philosophical debates.
There's already some work on rating knowledge in the semantic web community and it might be a good starting point to work on from there. I wonder if @grampo wants to weigh in?
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Sorry for the late reply, but sometimes I'm not inspired with an immediate response to a comment, but maybe better late than never.
Epistemology is a philosophical debate and it certainly is directly related to the ideas of this post.
And I will agree that the scientific method has little to say about philosophical debate (similarly it has little to say about math, although math can have plenty to say about science). I only meant to use the scientific method as an example of one way we can employ critical thinking methodologies, as opposed to relying on the opinions of others. Logic is another, and that one even works in philosophical debates.
As to why I didn't go deep into epistemology, it's because I haven't spent a lot of time studying the philosophical arguments of others in this area, so I don't consider myself an expert (although it wouldn't shock me if I get forced down that route at some point since we already see commenters claiming there are many types of truth).
But I'm not really proposing a definition(s?) of truth, I'm just looking at the issue pragmatically, in terms of how we mostly rate the truth of information now, and how we could improve those methods. Philosophers can and probably will argue for our entire life times about what it means for something to be true, but in the meantime we'll all be using our own methods for deciding what we believe to be true.
Sensible to remain pragmatic, epistemology is an abyss. Being explicit about your assumptions is plenty!
Justified True Belief is a common framework for knowledge and it appears you're proposing to use discourse (discussion, voting, user ratings) as a means to decide justification. It sounds like you're looking at web-of-trust/reputation to help qualify the justifiers - which will have a similar effect to what is meant by communities of discourse. Cool.
Actually really excited about this project.