I don't think that would necessarily result in a better wiki.
> Articles are cryptographically signed by authors.
This would significantly up the hurdle for doing edits and, given the meager popularity of PGP, not really pin down a person. But fair, I'd like to see that as a feature.
> Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles.
I don't see how this is different to a version history. For the most part, people just want the newest information; if a specific revision is needed, you can already direct-link to that.
> Articles have a unique and unchanging url.
Again doable via direct links. I see why you'd want to use that, but if I link (for example) my town, I want people to get the best info about my town and not that version I saw at that moment, unless I'm talking about edits specifically - in which case I'll link a revision. Of course, this requirement satisfies the crypto nerd in us, but it's really going against the usability here for hardly any gain whatsoever.
> Registered users can vote on articles.
Because that works so well for Reddit and all the other vote platforms. Or in science - see the replication crisis.
In all honesty, I think adding a popularity score into this is going to make things far worse. It'll just lead to repeating whatever happens to get votes, with everything else ignored. Why bother with the article of your town? No one cares about that, those two upvotes ...
Let's go start an edit war over the birthday of a person!
> Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those collections can be tread as an article.
Fair, but that's nothing that wouldn't be doable as of now.
> Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters.
That'd be actually interesting, but I don't think it be worth the drawback of votes. Also, people which were set to that group or people which self-identify as that group?