Consumerpedia

The Consumerpedia was a GodKing-and-sysop power structure-based project to create a GFDL corpus resource specifically to enable moral purchasing, which means only what the GodKing and his sysops say it means.

It claims to provide information that consumers need to develop strategies for engaging in moral purchasing and moral living, to evaluate the morality behind their purchases, and to locate enterprises or products they need. It is a direct competitor to the Research Wiki in which Consumerium gathers similar information, but has no consistent template for such pages.

It was initiated by DanKeshet and it runs MediaWiki. Although its content is under GFDL, it is guilty of some GFDL violations already, which is not a good sign. It might be useful as a gathering place for Company and Boycott info so that the Development Wiki can focus only on use cases that actually move us forward towards pilot projects. However, it appears to simply be getting in the way of a real Research Wiki at this point. Among other things it has no standard wiki URI, i.e.

http://www.channel1.com/users/dkesh/consumerpedia/index.php/Main_Page

is relatively impossible to remember, and thus unfit to use as a real address.

relationship

Something like Consumerpedia could be established and might work so well that it could become the Research Wiki - pages would be XML imported to the Publish Wiki where they'd be turned into a Consumerium buying signal, get only a final touch up for legal and language/translation/simplicity concerns, and reflect the buying criteria the user wants. There'd be no work for "our own" Research Wiki to do!

This sounds wonderful, but it's a fantasy. Without more structure and extremely consistent naming, it's going to be impossible to tell which companies or products are violating what criteria. Consumerium:intermediate pages are supposed to standardize that data in the Research Wiki. So, very likely, the best cases where we don't need it at all, aren't realistic, they're just visions worth working towards but not to be expected as an outcome.

Much more likely, Consumerpedia, Recyclopedia, Disinfopedia and Wikipedia will all serve in parallel as GFDL text corpus sources, and only limited standards will be applied in them all, hopefully based on terms and mandatory labels and comprehensive outcome names (like deforestation, slavery, ape extinction) that are already titles of articles in GFDL corpus. Deviating from such standard terms is a disaster, as, it makes it impossible to tell which buying criteria are being violated! So, it's worth every effort to keep all four major sources in line, and to work hard to translate these terms consistently into all other languages (so far, only a concern at Wikipedia)

This is a responsibility that User:Juxo and User:N8chz and User:Venceremos might choose to undertake, but which User:DanKeshet has so far actively resisted. There's danger it may become an enemy project, applying political norms unfit for any cooperation. It is off to a bad start by violating the GFDL just to exclude some trolls.

See Research Wiki pilots for some conditions of converging with other public wikis.