Eric Moeller wrote:

Whoa,

now that's a surprise -- a guy whose work I like to reference on Wikipedia and elsewhere shows up on, of all places, the Wikipedia tech mailing list. Welcome, Sheldon, and thanks for your excellent work with John Stauber on exposing the corporate PR machinery.

Thanks! (I'm blushing.)

I've often wanted to have more online material of yours that I could point people to, and perhaps Disinfopedia can become that.

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'm envisioning the "Disinfopedia" as an open source extension of our "Impropaganda Review" section, which you can find at the following URL: http://www.prwatch.org/improp/

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.

Of course, I would also appreciate it if you could contribute info, when you find the time, to the "real" Wikipedia. Have you thought about the license you want to use for your project yet? It's hard to operate a wiki under traditional copyright, and more beneficial to society not to.

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?

On balance, I think setting up a separate "Disinfopedia" is the way to go, for the following reasons:

(1) A "Disinfopedia" is likely to be more controversial and contested than Wikipedia, and the differences are significant enough to raise compatibility questions. (For example, Wikipedia's ethos regarding a "neutral point of view" may be harder to maintain in a "Disinfopedia.")

(2) There isn't a good way to clearly mark off a "Disinfopedia" as a subset of Wikipedia, and simply posting our material there would dilute and diffuse its specific focus.

(3) Having a separate Disinfopedia makes it easier for us to offer guidance on article format and content. For example, I want to encourage contributors to the Disinfopedia to follow the model we used in the Impropaganda Review, where each organizational profile consists of the following sections: * A general description * Personnel * History * Funding * Case studies * Contact information * Related information resources

As for your namespace links: It's possible - I would try to reduce the number of topical namespaces to 3 or 4 to avoid ambigiousness ("where do I need to go to get information X? case studies? issues? hmm .."). Also, try to think about good names. People:George W. Bush? Is that a page about George Bush or a page with links to people related to George Bush? (IMHO only the latter makes sense, as the page about George Bush should not have its own namespace, but this is not intuitively clear.)

Excellent points. I'm envisioning the extra namespaces as places for lists of related links, so People:George W. Bush would be a page with links to people related to Bush. Also, you're right that we don't need a separate namespace for "issues."

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...

Clicking on that page would take people to a textedit form, but instead of the start text saying "Put your text for the new page here," it would contain a template, e.g.:

...

Lists of people, events, funding, case studies and information resources related to [[George W. Bush]].

== People ==

• [[Name1]]
• [[Name2]]

== History ==

• [[Event1]], date
• [[Event2]], date

== Financial ==

• [[Funder1]]
• [[Funder2]]

== Case Studies ==

• [[Article1]]
• [[Article2]]

== Documentation ==

• [[Author]], [[Title]], [url], name of publication, pub date, page

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.

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? Also, how do you envision implementing page templates? Are you thinking of something along the lines of the example I gave above?

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?

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.

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?