CoWeb's Ability to Promote Learning

The article, "Recognizing and Supporting Roles in CSCW," is an interesting read. CoWeb is such a brilliant idea. First, it's more democratic compared with Wikis. Everybody can freely edit content. The flipside of this, however, is the possibility of creating confusion. Figure out a situation where a single article generates ten or twenty comments. How does filtering takes place? Some users might decide to act maliciously, by introducing unnecessary content, just to annoy. How can such people be tamed, especially if they're outside the university system?

Another advantage of CoWeb is that it's a freeware. This enables its sustained development. Thirdly, it's audience-focused. It makes use of simple text notation and HTML, to promote learning.

I am, however, worried that CoWeb's accesibility to, even, outsiders might compromise its credibility. Since the main goal of CoWeb is to promote learning, I am wondering what would happen if somebody outside the purview of the university system construes it as just another social networking tool.