The first problem for him is that Wikipedia has become a lot more organised. Content may not be edited in the traditional way, but a lot of it is policed and it now has some formal editorial guidelines. Content which doesn't fit the guidelines is deleted.
If I decided to put up a page about myself, it wouldn't last long. This might not be a bad thing, but it's some way short of complete bottom-up self-organising openness.
The second problem is that content quality is patchy. I've been doing some historical research, and the information about some rather obscure people I'm interested in turned out to be completely wrong once I started checking original sources.
The third problem is that this is the same old collaborative nonsense that has been keeping Silicon Valley happy for the last ten years or so. Open collaboration works very well for some things and very badly for others. It's a solution, and sometimes it's a good solution. But just as often it isn't - the most obvious proof being that collaborative projects, including Wikipedia, have mostly been me-too projects that have failed to do much real innovation.
You could imagine something cleverer than a Wiki, with smarter semantic links, net-like content displays, or other doodads. Instead you get trivia like tag clouds which make for interesting eye candy but don't mirror real information searches - and Wikipedia doesn't even do those.
Aggregating user content isn't a new idea, and it's a long way from being a political solution to anything. Politics has a more subtle set of problems, including motivating participation, preventing winner-takes-all gaming, narrative engineering, and others. Imperiously waving a paw and expecting a Wiki to deal with these issues and turn them into appropriate policy makes as much sense as expecting markets to be able to do it.
The final point is that Wikis are content, not media. No one will read a Wiki, no matter how good it is, unless they're led to the information and can find it if they're looking for it. It's a passive medium, ideal for aggregating relatively static knowledge bases. If you're looking for media outreach, Wikis aren't the answer.
If you want politics 2.0 you're going to have to have something which isn't just self-organising within limits, but is also largely self-correcting. Wikipedia kinda sorta has some of that. Politics 2.0 won't, unless it's built in. And there's going to be a lot more involved in designing it than building a simple content management system and throwing it open online.
What previous project/technology is Wikipedia copying?
No one will read a Wiki, no matter how good it is, unless they're led to the information and can find it if they're looking for it.
While Google's "hegemony over web searching" (in the U.S.) is in some ways regrettable, it does provide a quick and easy way to find quality content (e.g. Wikipedia, though I take your point about some poor quality articles on that site). So effectively content -- if it is deemed "good" by enough people -- can become media thanks to the exposure it gets via Google and other online "bottom-up promotional" mechanisms, e.g. basic linking, Digg, del.icio.us, etc.
But maybe I am not understanding what you mean by media. Is DailyKos media or content? Huffington Post? Does something become "media" simply when it gets over a certain threshold of regular attention? If so, why couldn't EuroTrib-cum-ETWiki also count as "media" if and when it gets the same kind of exposure? A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
marco:
Does something become "media" simply when it gets over a certain threshold of regular attention? If so, why couldn't EuroTrib-cum-ETWiki also count as "media" if and when it gets the same kind of exposure?
It turns into media once it starts affecting how the population as a whole votes, thinks, and spend its time and money.
Why do you think a this Wiki will do that when no other Wiki has, and ET's previous Wiki died from neglect and indifference?
you are the media you consume.
Writing content for Wikipedia is not just "aggregating" it.
Again, can you give me a previous example or precedent of a functional equivalent of a wiki? (I am sure itt's out there, there is nothing new under the sun, I am just curious as to what it is.)
and it's a long way from being a political solution to anything.
That's true. But no one is talking about a one-stop solution. We're talking about one small, yet potentially very significant, component in an evolving tentative to get our words out to a wider audience. (With respect to Wikipedia as a potential model for political organization, it is even less a one-stop solution, but I think it suggests interesting possibilities that could be incorporated in political organization and processes.)
Politics has a more subtle set of problems, including motivating participation, preventing winner-takes-all gaming, narrative engineering, and others.
With respect to "motivating participation", I don't see how writing for a wiki would be significantly different in nature than writing for EuroTrib or contributing to previous EuroTrib-inspired or -led written projects such as the Stop Blair campaign, the response to the EU Energy proposal, LTEs, or Energize America. Quite possibly contributions to a wiki would be significantly different in volume: they may be fewer and smaller, but they very well may be more frequent and/or larger. None of us has any clue until we actually try it.
Furthermore, the very purpose of an ETpedia (but of EuroTrib in general, I think) is to "motivate participation" on a much wider scale, where by "participation" I mean concern and engagement in social issues in our daily lives, not just only participation by contributing diaries, articles, and comments.
As for "preventing winner-takes-all gaming, narrative engineering", I don't think I am clear on what you mean by these terms. But I don't see how an ETpedia would not contribute in a positive way (from our point of view) to preventing these. On a "micro-level", ETpedia would be an invitation to individuals to contribute their opinions, ideas and expertise (how does a winner take all? who is engineering a narrative, if not all participants together?); and on a "macro-level", out in the world at large, it would throw a concert of voices against the predominant narrative developed through the "winner-takes-all gaming, narrative engineering" you refer to (and which in this instance I take to mean roughly neoliberalism & neoconservativism).
Imperiously waving a paw
I'm not sure I get the idiom. But what is "imperious" about using Wiki, or proposing its use, as a medium for articulating, storing, and presenting the ideas and arguments of this community?
and expecting a Wiki to deal with these issues and turn them into appropriate policy makes as much sense as expecting markets to be able to do it.
The comparison about expecting markets to "do the right thing" is partially accurate, in the sense that with a wiki, multiple "suppliers" (writer-contributors) can "compete" (write and edit our bloody hearts out) to provide a "product" (wiki-articles) for "consumption" (reading, distribution) by "customers" (in this case, other writer-contributors, but see below), where "winners" are those whose "product" most appeals to the "demands" of most "customers". There are also parallels with formal structures (the "editorial guidelines" you mentioned) and overseers (minimal though they should be) that correspond to institutional structures in commercial markets, regulations and regulators.
However, there are several critical ways in which this analogy does not hold and is misleading:
For one, in a market, the customer of a product is not at the same time its producer (typically); however, with a wiki as we would implement for ETpedia, the customer is at the same time the producer. In fact, in one important way, consuming is producing. For how does a market work? Consumers (theoretically) "choose" winners by buying their product over those of others. In a wiki, how does a "consumer" choose a winner: by letting their content stand unedited. But a consumer can "de-choose" a winner by editing or removing the content, and in that way the consumer -- by altering the content -- becomes a producer. But even there, the analogy is iffy, because minor edits are not necessarily choosing against a producer/contributor, but rather directly helping them to improve their product: how often does that happen in the modern market? In effect, every consumer (i.e. readers with editing privileges) are potential producers. This is very different from how the typical market works. (True, ultimately ETpedia's "customer" would be the "reader at large", i.e. beyond the ET community. But that is not the sort of Wiki-customer who would bring "market" forces to bear in the generation of ETpedia content -- except of course on a much broader level: will people "out there" like and/or agree with, absorb, and propagate what they read on the ETpedia.)
Another problem with this analogy has to do with incentive. The primary incentive in the marketplace is survival/security/comfort/wealth, and competition is the primary dynamic. That quite pointedly would not be the case for ETpedia. Color me idealist, but I think such a wiki would be driven by a range of factors, from vanity and ego points, to outrage and anger at the current state of society, to concern, commitment and passion for making positive changes in society we grosso modo all share. And I would bet that while vanity/ego-points would play some role in motivating us to write, it would only be a relatively small role, at least a muted one, and not the driving factor, not nearly enough at any rate to drive the wiki on its own. If such a wiki sustains itself and propels itself forward, it will be on the other more collaborative and constructive factors. Competition may exist in a minor key (enough to keep each other honest), the major key will be cooperation.
(There are other difficulties with the wiki-as-marketplace analogy, but I am not sure how relevant they are here.)
At any rate: The proof of the pudding will be in its eating. We can suppose and speculate all we like, but only if we try it can we say whether or not using a wiki will significantly move us closer to reaching our objective.
*On the issue of "labor scarcity", I am referring to the labor in generating content for ETpedia, not the labor for setting it up, maintaining, and overseeing it. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
With respect to "motivating participation", I don't see how writing for a wiki would be significantly different in nature than writing for EuroTrib or contributing to previous EuroTrib-inspired or -led written projects such as the Stop Blair campaign, the response to the EU Energy proposal, LTEs, or Energize America.
Because a Wiki isn't a public debate.
All of the other actions were examples of setting out a position and arguing for it in public.
Wikis are a walled garden which you're allowed to visit and build in - if you can be bothered - but they're not in the public eye in the way that TV and print media are already, and blogs are starting to be.
Also, if you want to set policy and influence how people think, act, and vote, you do it with rhetoric and not with pure facts.
Unfortunately facts have exactly zero political influence without support from rhetoric.
For one, in a market, the customer of a product is not at the same time its producer (typically); however, with a wiki as we would implement for ETpedia, the customer is at the same time the producer. In fact, in one important way, consuming is producing.
So what Wikis actually produce is the - misguided - illusion of political participation. It's misguided because most of the population has absolutely no interest in either consuming a Wiki or helping produce it. And since it's not really politics if no one notices or cares what you're doing, there's a bit of a problem there.
Wikipedia gets around this by being general enough to turn itself into a project which can capitalise on a broad and disconnected patchwork of interests. When you have a very specific focus, the readership and list of potential contributors rapidly approaches zero. Previous political wiki efforts have proved this by specialising themselves into either comedy or irrelevance.
George Bush and Dick Cheney will not be trembling with fear at night because ET has decided to create a Wiki.
They will certainly have noticed dKos by now, and will be unhappy it exists. But dKosopedia won't figure on their radar.
dKos has had an effect. The other prog-blogs have had an effect.
dKosopedia - not so much. I'm not sure how many readers of dKos are even aware that dKosopedia exists. It's had 2,000,000 hits since 2004, where the main dKos page might get 2,000,000 hits a day.
Check out the hit counts for individual articles. The Plamegate timeline - not a small story - has had a total of 71,000. The Attorney scandal has had a little over 2,000. Global Warming has had just over 5,000 hits.
We're talking about one of the biggest and most influential prog-blogs in the blogosphere, and the Wiki there isn't generating any more than footnote traffic, not even with a link from the dKos front page.
It's not that the content is bad - more that hardly anyone is interested in it.
A Wiki as an internal resource makes sense. If people are happy spending time on it, it's as good a way of collecting diaries as any.
But it shouldn't be confused with media outreach or policy debate, and shouldn't be considered a substitute for it.
And when you insist on going back to the 'original sources' what makes you think that the original sources are not biased? There's something of the biblical about all information - every single bit of fucking data in this world is biased because a matrix excludes as well as includes. The very nature of communication, even an understanding of the word communication, is relative.
Thirdly - innovation, as such, is not of itself important, except to satisfy the Novelty Factor. An important capability of our human processing of experience perhaps, but it pales beside our rightful celebration of banality.
All other points - it is always constructive to criticize constructively....
I just didn't want you to get away with fingerpointing rant that points out that 8 year olds are terrible at sex. As a parent you have other responsibilities ;-)
This comment is not as grey as I would like.... You can't be me, I'm taken
