Advice on a social enterprise - Video Skill Sharing Encyclopedia

I’m after some advice regarding creating an encyclopedia of short videos tutorials on life skills to be shared freely on the web.

I classify a life skill as any human task that one person is proficient in which interests at least one other person somewhere. This could range from how to chop an onion to teaching computer programming. The reason for choosing videos as the primary medium is that many skills are better taught by visual instruction, such as cooking, crafting, painting. I would argue that there is currently a lack of comprehensive video instructions for many of these skills on the web.

Similar to Wikipedia, I would like to organise the site like an encyclopedia, in order that there is only one article/video per skill - this is to avoid repetition and to ensure that only the best content is shown as the definitive guide to a task.

I would appreciate any feedback on where to go from here - is the idea original? Is it good/bad/stupid/crazy? Also, if anyone is interested in taking this a step further please get in touch.

Thanks.

EDIT Thanks for the feedback John Sjölander. Compiling a list of wikipedia's most popular articles would certainly be a good starting point. I would like to position the site as the practical-arm of Wikipedia (which is academic), however I would not want to include some popular/controversial topics such as religion or politics, as they do not fit my definition of a skill. It would be better to stick to things like DIY, cooking, computer tutorials (e.g. photo editing, programming, pc maintainance). Will compile a full list and update this shortly.

I was wondering what CMS to use or whether to build my own? It could be a media wiki Wiki like Wikipedia, but I don't think it supports voting. Also should I be looking for funding/donations for this kind of work? What should be the next step?

Very interesting! It seems similar to udemy.com.

As with all ideas, tens of people are working on a competing company. So don't let that stop you. (as discussed here )

An interesting thing would be to index wikipedias most popular articles (i'm sure there's a way) and mirror those with skills presented on your site. That way you wouldn't have to worry too much about the structure of the content, and also, you'd have a way to figure out what content was most likely to become popular. Also, I wouldn't worry too much about having one unique video / skill. Use a voting system and the best will float on top. Much like the answers do here.

But please tell us more. :-)