[Foundation-l] Re2: New project - wikicracy

[Vincent Mandrilly]

A) Reply to Thomas Dalton
B) Reply to Milos Rancic

A) Reply to Thomas Dalton
quote : "I'm not sure those two characteristics work well together."
- Agree for the difficulty to combine both. But it is even worse when 
decision making is not democratic or when democracy do not try to build a 
consensus.
One solution could be to be able to take decisions (when it is needed to 
solve a problem fast) while continuing (when possible) to search for a 
better consensus if at the time of the decision many disapproved the choice 
made by the majority.
quote : "the main problem is that you don't say what you intend this site to 
make decisions about".It sounds like your are just proposing an online 
debating society, which really isn't something the
Wikimedia Foundation would have anything to do with
- Indeed, I do not propose to make a political party, or a friendship 
committee, or a wiki for general debate. If a wiki develop a nice tools that 
features all the ideas I made, all these tools, all this development work 
will never be helpful for the whole community.
Instead, I propose the development of add-ons to wiki that virtually any 
group of people, small (little association) or big (country or all the 
people connected to internet) could use.
Wikimedia software is exactly the same: imagine an association would have 
developed a wiki for itself, and never planned to share it with the online 
community
 we wouldn’t have such a widely use of wikis today.
I don’t know if this can be a Wikimedia project, but I believe the people 
who created wiki will be interested to continue their formidable work and 
help create this improved version of wiki. For me, it looks like a natural 
evolution of the tool to apply it to more challenging applications: the 
field of debate and decision making after successfully being applied to the 
field of information.
- last note: (quote: “[
]is likely to end up with a large number of 
propositions without definite borders between them”) :
Yes, choosing one solution within a large diversity of possibilities has 
always been delicate. But I prefer a choice between the best propositions, 
than no choice. I have always seen the diversity of point of view as 
richness, but with one condition: that it doesn’t lead to conflict. And the 
best way to avoid conflict is to provide guidelines. The wikicracy project, 
(and it is the same with Wikipedia and other wiki) will be specifically 
designed to provide such guidelines and give the best environment to ensure 
most users will tend to have a constructive criticism, while preserving the 
work from vandalism.

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>I propose today to adapt wiki software (a few add-ons could do it) to 
>create a special wiki with the following main characteristics :
>- Allow to build cooperative propositions
>- Allow to vote on the propositions democratically

I'm not sure those two characteristics work well together. Democracy can 
only decide between a finite number of discrete choices. A co-operative 
proposition building process is likely to end up with a large number of 
propositions without definite borders between them.
Wikis are good for building consensus, not for managing a democracy.

That aside, the main problem is that you don't say what you intend this site 
to make decisions about. It sounds like your are just proposing an online 
debating society, which really isn't something the
Wikimedia Foundation would have anything to do with. By all means create 
your own site along those lines, but it will never be a Wikimedia project.
----------------------------------------------------

B) Reply to Milos Rancic
- Any group may be interested to build such a tool. The actual state of the 
proposal is just one sheet of paper, and I don’t intend to present a one 
page project to associations/cities/countries or whatever group. So if you 
have a lot of ideas related to this issue, and if you got some free time to 
want to waste with me, no need to wait the project has been formulated by 
others, and feel free to participate.
- The ones that should be the most interested by this project
 are logically 
the ones that have been interested by developing the wiki software at its 
beginning.
- My problem finding municipalities is, for my part, that I live
 in China. 
(Wikipedia has recently been unblocked by my Chinese provider, but not the 
Chinese wikipages
)
- I am not sure of the best name to select for this project; I’d rather have 
it becoming a common decision of the developing team. Besides I am not 100% 
sure yet such a project doesn’t exist.

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When Jimmy was talking something about politics.wikia, I was thinking that 
it was a platform for something like this idea. And I was disappointed when 
I realized that it is just a one more Wikipedia fork one more specific field 
(political parties).

I think that this is a good idea (of course, not for WM) if it has 
connections with a "real world". MediaWiki (wiki in general, but MediaWiki 
especially) is a good platform for articulating political
thoughts of communities (from small to huge; I am sure that with some 
software improvements countries/states with around 20 millions of 
inhabitants may work together on one MediaWiki).

So, my suggestions are:

- Buy domain wikicracy.org (or something which you like); it is something 
like $10/year; try with godaddy.com, for example.
- Ask Wikia (http://www.wikia.com/) for hosting.
- Build a theoretical model.
- Find real communities (for example, some municipalities) which are willing 
to switch to MW in their decision-making process.

When you make some initial steps (everything is quite easy except to find 
some communities, so, let's say, when you have active contacts with at leas 
one community which is willing to switch to MW) -- I am willing to join you 
and to help. (I have a lot of ideas related to this issue.)
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Sincerely,

Vincent Mandrilly

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