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.

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.

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