On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 06:45:05PM +0800, Andrew Lih wrote:
On 4/18/05, Chad Perrin perrin@apotheon.com wrote:
It seems to me like too good an idea to pass up, really, and if this community doesn't like it enough to implement it, I'm sure a community for such can be generated from the luminiferous ethere of the Internet.
Of course, I'm so busy as it is that if I end up having to create it myself it'll probably take three years to get around to it.
They do exist today, but usually the battle lines are drawn up in terms of polarizing left- and right-wing opinion. It would be interesting if a community could develop that would tolerate and engage in civil discourse given the vitriolic opinion pieces that tend to show up on these sites. I'm skeptical, but would love to be proved wrong.
The mechanisms for other community opinion-column sites are wholly different at the technical level from this, and tend to aggregate similarly-minded opinionated people. With a more open entry mechanism, an article-based format (as opposed to a journal-like blog), and encouragement of contrasting opinions by virtue of the fact that agreeing columns would be redundant and ignorable, I think something entirely different from previous op/ed communities would be the result of such a thing. I don't know that it would be appropriate for Wikimedia, but it does strike me as sort of a close cousin of wiki, and something worth trying at some point.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]