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Malifax, what if you had a system that was designed to increase the average quality of descriptions?
Take, for example the act of designing the description for a room. You could have a collection of say 1000 (or however many) base sentences, from which the room designer gets to choose 5 - 8. Each of these sentences has customizable adjectives, allowing for a greater amount of customization. With the restriction of using premade sentences, nobody with a base level of intelligence can make a description that is too bad. Now, of course, even with thousands of sentences from which to choose you limit flexibility and eventually you'll get repetition, so you can then look at people with say 100 rooms built, look at the quality and flow of their areas, and slowly give them more and more rights - the ability to write their own complete descriptions in the end. If you created an out of character praise/report system allowing for people to anonymously praise descriptions that they enjoy, and report ones that they don't, it'd further ease the job of quality control.
To clarify on the sentence collection, you could have for example a file with a list of sentences as follows:
In the centre of the [adj] room sits a [adj] table.
From here, the player could create something like:
In the centre of the smelly room sits a giant table.
Obviously, it would rely on a creative person to create the tagged sentences to begin with (can you tell I'm not a writer?). In any case, I'm sure such a system would require more thought than what I've just given it, but it seems like a good starting point.
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