Opinion Wiki

There is little consensus on this issue yet, and some terms are factionally defined. See what to accept as fact for more on the basic questions and how they affect moral purchasing potential.

Trolls argue:

Research Wiki is the present name proposed for this function, recognizing that there is some overlap between the R&D wiki function and the long-term need to track trends in terminology, faction debates and discovery of what is actually considered fair for the Publish Wiki in the alternative naming scheme) versus what is "subjective".

Lawyers argue:

Please see the The Diff from the last version or The original article for a simpler view before horde(s) of trolls edited. Or see best cases for how the opinion wiki should enable the whole project.

Consumerium:intermediate page has the stable subset of what is below.

Background

People express opinions in all sorts of ways, and when they really believe in those opinions they are likely to give them names like "research" to indicate they really are willing to bet some reputation or credibility on them. Other ways to express opinions are to vote or to hurt someone or sabotage something. All of these are ways to express opinions, but if we all use the hurting or sabotaging method, we will not have a civilization long. So it's always very important to figure out how we can bet or vote on something, or at best quietly sabotage something bad without pretending we are all morally right to do so, to avoid having to hurt any body.

Political ideologies tend to say there is one "best way" to do this. Some, sometimes called "right-wing" see opinions as most objectively expressed in a "market" form... but The Consumerium Exchange, some complain, is a misleading name for this facility, which is about expressing opinions and support or the lack of for the expressed opinions. It does not translate well at all - hence we use opinion for now, and maybe consider that opinion can be seen as research by those who really believe in the premises that the original researcher has had.

Whatever we call it, it will be a large public wiki with the special problems of that type of communication. Including choosing a good name.

As mentioned in Campaign, campaign management may be best organized by wiki. This would be simple and straightforward for the campaigners. It would require only a low-end browser to contribute to the semantic web of views. No fixed email address would be required. Many client software variations might work.

We can extend the use of wiki beyond campaign management so that most of the user interface to The Consumerium Exchange would be wiki based - with edit, vote and bet actions supported.

Note: to bet might only be to bet on whether an edit will stand, or whether a possibly-unnecessary vote will go a certain way. Thus annoyance votes and annoyance edits can be heavily discouraged - and those who know what's popular, or true, will be rewarded for putting money where their mouth is.

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Needs Statement of Opinion Wiki

A needs statement outlines requests that may or may not be in the requirements list. Not every "need" is a "requirement", but all needs should be discussed, and associated with types of users.

Namespaces

• User - no offending usernames please
• Troll - a group of edits (not users) that Users think all represent some single point of view, maybe one person, or many co-operating, and which anyone can claim to be adding to - a sort of mask or faction. So there might be no actual User: named "Communist" but there might be a "Troll" by that name, and "Communist" opinions could be classified as part of that virtual personality, no matter who wrote them. Like a role account only what belongs in it is defined after the fact. They can't vote, nor bet - but they can have all the opinions they want. The main use of this is to find out if any Users share so much style or opinion with a known troll profile, that they are probably the same person with many votes or accounts.
• Group - must correspond to a real-world registered entity
• Consumerium:faction - must not conflict with names of real-world entities. Consists of Users and Groups and other Consumerium:factions - these are for collective and alleged identity
• Campaign - preferably descriptive names, and preferably recognizable to people doing real world campaigns say in NGOs.

Set articles and permissions

No subarticles should be created yet, since there is no agreement yet on any of the above. Edit what's below to improve it.

User

• User/Keys - If a person wishes to sign articles s/he should put keys used here. Protection by social contract and page protection if required (optional)
• User/Trolls - comments others have considered bogus or silly or classified as having come from some ideology or attitude - this is helpful mostly to the user who can see what propaganda others think they are spouting. If EVERYTHING a User says is a troll, they might be a bot, or paid to spread some opinion, or really trollish.
• User/Votes - every link from here to voting pages will be counted as a vote for the campaign
• User/Bets - every link from here to betting pages is added up.

Group

• Group - creation of group pages only by registering within the Vault.
• Group/Keys - keys used for signing articles (optional)
• Group/Votes - every link from here to voting pages will be counted as a vote for the campaign
• Group/Bets - if the real world group has got some financial interest in something, and it affects consumerium opinions, it should be declared here for transparency. That doesn't mean it *must* be revealed, but those that do reveal are more ethical.
• Group/Members - All Group articles editable by those Users listed in this article.
• Group/Trolls - trollish statements and propaganda that the Group agrees with - say those that come from its literature. This makes it easy to see which Users are just repeating things that some Group says, and if any Trolls are repeating the phrases of some Group.
• Group/Affiliations - Listing affiliations with Companies and other organisations

VirtualGroup

• VirtualGroup - can be creted freely by any User, but will be disabled if the name is misleading or offending
• VirtualGroup/Keys - keys used for signing articles (optional)
• VirtualGroup/Votes - every link from here to voting pages will be counted as a vote for the campaign
• VirtualGroup/Bets - any shared bets that several Users have made together through the interface; No need to declare offline bets.
• VirtualGroup/Trolls - any trollishness that appears to emerge from more than one User or IP
• VirtualGroup/Members - All VirtualGroup articles editable by those Users listed in this article. Users may not remove other users from this, only themselves. When the last User removes her/himself from the page the VirtualGroup ceases to exist. All links to Groups and other VirtualGroups from this page will be recursively followed to find out the total amount of members, real and virtual respectively. Possible links are:
  • User
  • Troll
  • Group
  • VirtualGroup

Campaign

• Campaign - Can be started by Groups and VirtualGroups
• Campaign/Target - link to the issue being campaigned
• Campaign/Score - required
• Campaign/Members - The campaign is editable by these. Recurse to find total amount of members
• Campaign/Vote - Used as a link-to target from
  • UserName/Votes
  • GroupName/Votes
  • VirtualGroupName/Votes
• Campaign/Bet - Used as a link-to target from
  • UserName/Bets
  • GroupName/Bets
  • VirtualGroupName/Bets

Trolls do not bet or vote, they only have opinions, so there are no links from campaigns.

More on Opinion Wiki

• From these bits of information directed, weighed networks describing distribution of WikiVotes and Campaigners can be formed and the directed networks will be used to calculate indices that can be studied
• Cycles (A is a member of B and B is a member of A) will be autodetected and while the situation persists A and B will have reduced or zero value in the bigger scheme of things
• Subarticles can be automatically collapsed to the main article for a better viewing experience
• Please note that the outline contains mainly only those articles and subarticles required to form hierarchies, not much on actual content
• Looks like we are going to have Three classes of votes:
  • WikiVote
  • Direct Vote
  • Indirect Vote
• Duplicate WikiVotes can occour by accident, by purpose and apparently by design eg. Group:Association X National Section belongs to Group:Association X International
  • There must be rules on which of the votes gets excluded in this case.
  • The apparent approaches being top-down and bottom-up.
  • Which is better is a curious question. My guess suggestion is bottom-up so that "Local Votes" get included and "Federal Votes" get excluded
• This is in no way complete and there is likely a lot of opportunities for new kinds of vandalism

Note that there could be multiple levels of (un)security available for committing changes to Opinion Wiki:

1. Anonymous access - if allowed, there must certainly be ways to spot and connect various edits by Consumerium Trolls.
2. Access protected by password over HTTP
3. Access protected by password over HTTPS
4. Access protected by GnuPG signatures on save with self claimed keys - higher overhead but still possible for funded trolls to use to manipulate the outcomes
5. Access protected by GnuPG signatures on save with keys verified by a third party or Consumerium Vault - much harder to abuse, but so high overhead that it's also hard to use legitimately
6. Access protected by GnuPG signatures on save with keys verified by third parties and Consumerium Vault
7. Access protected by GnuPG signatures on save with keys verified by third parties and Consumerium Vault including biometrics to actually track every edit or vote to a real body of a living person - no trolls allowed! But that person still could be a funded user getting paid to distort opinions a certain way.

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See also:

• Content Wiki