[Wikimedia-l] Why the Wikimedia Foundation should openly articulate its political POV by establishing a new neutral wiki for world political knowledge (modeled on Wikipedia)

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Carmen <yarrusso at charter.net> wrote:
>>
>>> For example, in the encyclopedic Wikipedia, there's one article called Brooklyn Bridge...
>
> Actually, I've just considered this a bit longer (for my sins). It
> occurs to me that perhaps you're not looking at big issues (like
> abortion) but you perhaps mean something that would invigorate local
> politics? You did give the example of building a bridge after all.
>
> I suppose that would be an innovation: a wiki that covers political
> issues that would be considered "non-notable" on Wikipedia.
>
> The trouble you're going to have then, though, is participation. How
> many people are going to want to join together to create a few pages
> detailing the decision to stop the 34B bus service?
>
> Bodnotbod

This would be a fantastic part of a locally-focused wiki, however.
Taking the example of the Davis city wiki (http://daviswiki.org),
local politics gets covered there all the time, with heated arguments
taking place in the comments!

So I suspect the solution for coverage of local issues is to embed
them in context, which is more helpful anyway (when you have a site
that describes the bridge, the body of water, the city, and the local
politicians AS WELL as controversies around any of the above). In
other words: all politics is rooted in community; some communities are
bigger than others.

As for the project proposal, I'd work on clarifying how you expect the
wiki aspect to work specifically; it seems like this would be
particularly hard to maintain. I suspect any system that limits itself
to edits from a small group of people as you seem to propose doing
wouldn't work very well. Additionally, I believe there have been a few
stabs at similar projects from other groups that you might look at;
Andrew Lih's idea for collective news annotation comes to mind, as do
others.

(As for the Signpost -- publishing full essays in support of project
proposals is a bit much, but doing brief writeups of new project
proposals on a regular basis in the Signpost seems like a good idea!)

best,
Phoebe