Trusted editors

A blog feature request from http://a.wholelottanothing.org/archives.blah/007942 on A Whole Lotta Nothing:

Wishlist: the million monkeys at a million typewriters plugin

Today as I sent an IM to a friend correcting a their/there/they're use in a blog post, it reminded me that I should post a lazyweb request for an MT plugin I've always wanted.

I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. If I'm gone for a couple days and improperly used your when I meant you're, I'd love it if a friend fixed that while I was away. I first got the idea when I was trying to think of ways to make Orkut or Friendster useful. If there was some API to those apps that let MT know if someone was a best friend or life partner-level connection, they could be granted temporary edit rights on my blog (maybe Flickr's API could let this work for people I designate as a friend and family member, which seems to be the closest form of relationship there).

Ideally, I'd like an easy way to say that 4 or 5 people I trust could make edits. And I suppose the edits should be checked before and after, with a certain byte count limit, lest you allow your friends to completely rewrite your post. An email telling me what took place would be nice, but I'd like my friends to go ahead and save their changes, with a way for me to rescue the earlier pre-edit entry just in case.

Actually, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to allow anyone to suggest an edit on the post, sending me an email, with a one-click way to approve or disapprove it. Maybe after a random stranger has properly corrected me half a dozen times, I could elevate their status to having republish rights on the edits so I wouldn't have to approve them anymore.

A plugin like this would basically wiki-ize the weblog world, allowing readers to participate and correct small mistakes. I often write in margins of books and email authors all the little typos I found while reading their novel, but this would put that kind of power right into anyone's hands. In the world of programming they say "given a million eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and maybe in this case, given a million editors, all typos will be fixed.

It can't be impossible to make this happen, right?