Sheldon,
I presume the conference where you heard about Wikipedia was the World- InfoCon. If so, did you by any chance hear about it on day two from Volker Grassmuck? He's a friend of mine, and a couple of weeks before the con he called me and asked me about cool projects in the area of collaborative journalism and peer-to-peer networks. I told him about Wikipedia, and he promised to bring it up at the conference. If that's where you heard about it, I can take at least some small credit for you being here now :-)
I'm assuming that you've seen the PR Watch web site. We have a fair amount of material there, including archives of PR Watch dating back almost to its founding, plus our "Spin of the Day" feature (which typically includes 10-15 new items each week).
I knew about the news items, but I didn't know Impropaganda Review. Very good resource. The advantage of a Disinfopedia is, of course, that as a collaborative/interactive project, it would attract more attention and could quickly become a central meeting point for people interested in the subject.
Once I have the wiki software tweaked and functioning the way I want, I'll seed the Disinfopedia with our existing articles from the Impropaganda Review plus some other similar information, and offer it under the GNU General Public License. At some future point, we may choose to do the same thing with other parts of our web site.
As Derek pointed out, the GPL may not be the best choice, as it was written for software and contains many software-specific clauses. The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is more specifically tailored towards documents, and that's why the Wikipedia project uses it. It would also make Disinfopedia articles compatible with Wikipedia (license compatibility is a big issue).
See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACopyrights for details.
Of course you could also be really hip and use the brand new open content license generator by the Creative Commons Project:
http://www.creativecommons.org/
Caveat, though, as such a license *may* render Disinfopedia content incompatible with Wikipedia.
I've already made a few minor contributions to the "real" Wikipedia, and I plan to continue doing so. You've touched here on one of the questions that I've been wondering about: Should we set up a separate "Disinfopedia," or just use the "real" Wikipedia as a repository for the knowledge base I'm trying to develop?
I think a Disinfopedia is just fine, for the reasons you mentioned. NPOV allows people with vastly different views to work together, but it also means that an article about, say, the Cato Institute will include glowing comments from libertarians. Wikipedia doesn't "care" much if these statements are correct or wrong, only if they are attributed to their adherents. This may not be what you want if you need to refer people to a quick summary of the facts. Also, articles are more likely to be completely rewritten, making them less reliable as a reference.
On the other hand, many articles, such as the Global warming article, would benefit greatly from a more detailed discussion of the PR wars surrounding the subjects in question. This needs not be done by you if the Disinfopedia license is compatible with the Wikipedia license.
Perhaps the thing to do would be to simply have ONE additional namespace, titled "relationships" (plus, of course, "relationships_talk"). At the bottom of an article on "George W. Bush," there would be a link to an article on Bush's "Relationships to People, Organizations, Funders, etc." Assuming the article hasn't yet been created, the URL would read: http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Relationships:George_W._Bush&am... tion=edit
In that case, I would be in favor of ditching the idea altogether, as the relationship stuff could just as well be embedded into the main articles. As you say:
Yet another possibility would be to forego extra namespaces altogether, and simply post prominent guidelines explaining the kind of structure we're envisioning. I would hope that people would TRY to follow our recommended structure, but it would be okay if they sometimes deviate from it.
This is one of the problems we are currently facing with the brand new Wiktionary spin-off project:
http://wiktionary.wikipedia.org/
Dictionary articles are much more structured, and keeping that structure somewhat consistent has been fairly difficult, owing in large part to the fact that we have pretty much defined it as we went along with the project. Make sure you define any policies before you launch, and to prominently link to them on the editing page.
Regarding templates, you nailed it: They would probably be best namespace- dependant. Create a new article, and you get the standard article template. Create a new talk page, you get an empty page. If you use more namespaces, you can use more templates. But remember that for any new namespace you have, linking gets more difficult.
Alternatively, you could do all sorts of javascripty stuff on the edit page (buttons to insert standard text blocks), but I think this would be too browser-dependant.
One other way to get the functionality would be to implement HTML anchors in wiki syntax. That way you could link to [[George W. Bush#people]] to get to the specific article section. You could also implement page templates to get a default structure for articles.
Are HTML anchors currently implemented in wiki syntax?
HTML anchors are not yet implemented, but this is a project I'd be willing to tackle. We just need a nifty syntax.
And what about the idea of creating "pseudo-namespaces"? What I'm envisioning here is a way of object-typing prospective articles so that page templates could be customized according to object type. For example, [[person:George W. Bush]] might create a template with sections such as date of birth, career highlights, etc., whereas [[organization:Cato Institute]] might create a template with sections such as personnel, funders, publications. Has there been much discussion about ways of integrating Wiki's free-form approach with XML-style object-typing and data-structuring?
Not really, also because we don't really need that much default structuring on Wikipedia (although having consistent names and style for links, bibliography etc. would help). Do I understand you correctly when I assume that when you want a link like [[person:George W. Bush]], you want to later be able to link to this page by just using [[George W. Bush]], but use the "person" prefix during page creation to choose a proper template? In that case, the question would arise what would happen to this qualifier after the page has been created.
If you want more templates without more namespaces, you could also insert an extra step during page creation:
Choose a template
Person This template contains the following .. Company ... ...
Since page creation is not as common as page editing, I think the extra step wouldn't be too high a price to pay. As an added bonus, you could alter the table structure of cur, old etc. to store the template class just in case you want to evaluate it for anything else.
PS: "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" should really be available as a GNU FDL e-book. We need to get this book into schools :-)
Personally, I'd be interested in seeing this happen, but "Toxic Sludge" was published by a commercial press, and I don't know how they'd feel about releasing it into GNU space.
You could propose a deal, like asking for donations on the ebook page (I could send you some data that supports the donation model) and giving the publisher a certain percentage of those donations. You would probably have a stronger case once the book is out of print, but there's virtually no data that suggests free online availability would lead to a decline in print sales -- rather the opposite. See, for example:
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver6.htm http://www.baen.com/library/palaver7.htm
Try to think like a PR drone -- how can you sell this idea to a publisher? ;-)
On a related tack, I've been toying with the idea of writing my NEXT book as an open source project from start to finish. We would begin by posting a chapter outline and letting anyone edit, contribute and annotate while we write. Do you think this would work? Would it be possible to publish the book commercially and get it into bookstores if the writing process took place within a GNU framework? Would the GNU license be necessary to attract collaborators?
Yes, I think it would work, but you need to do a lot of editing to keep the thing consistent. Be sure to name some volunteers as copyeditors to maintain this consistence. Also, wikis typically evolve a non-linear structure -- if you want to avoid this, start with a linear skeleton and discourage the creation of too many new pages.
If the book is profitable, you are sure to get inquiries from contributors about the distribution of profits. Most agreeable would probably be a solution where any and all profits are donated to a single charity agreed upon by all participants.
The GNU license is not necessary and there are others, but I see no reason not to use it, since it works.
There are some publishers who might be interested in such an undertaking. O'Reilly has published a few open content books, and not everything O'Reilly publishes is computing-related, although some connection to the world of computing and the Net would help to get them interested. Baen Books provides many books for free download (not open content), but I think they only do fiction.
Publishing on demand only costs the author a few hundred dollars and guarantees a virtually unlimited supply (no further charge per book). Personally I think this would be the most interesting option, but it is also the most radical. Prices and quality vary greatly here, but it's not hard to find reviews and I'm sure there are attractive options.
There's also traditional self-publishing. You may wish to read the article "Adventures in Self-Publishing" on Kuro5hin and possibly contact the author:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/12/223216/520
K5 is another highly interesting collaborative writing / discussion site, BTW, with articles and comments being voted on by readers. Now if you really want to do something revolutionary, you could transform the PR Watch website into a combination of a Scoop-powered collaborative weblog and a Wikipedia-based wiki. :-) It's this combination of weblogs and wikis that I'm highly interested in; one of my pet projects is to implement a wiki as part of the Scoop engine that K5 uses.
All best,
Erik