Wikipedia (Reds): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:35, 9 September 2004

thout seriously considering its governance structure, and that Wikimedia is simply a front organization for the same power structure that was described in early 2002 by Wales - a simple hierarchy with himself in charge, no accountability to anyone, not even donors who believe they are supporting a GFDL encyclopedia with "open" editing.

There has been some examination of the project's role and the way it portrays itself, see w:Wikipedia:Itself for a list of contributions relevant to the form of Wikipedia, itself.

In general, Wikipedia has a dishonest view of itself, and presents itself very dishonestly as an attempt to build an encyclopedia, when in fact it appears to do little or nothing to meet the editorial standards of a serious encyclopedia, and forces people of strong qualifications to answer to petty abuse from various parties of no particular qualifications at all, as the project turned to popular selection of contributors and casual verification of content, often on ad hominem reasoning toward authors, instead of a more formal fact-checking process. It should be seen as a project that helped build the GFDL text corpus in many languages, but is now in decline. Much as the attempt to build a "GNU Unix" built the body of GPL code.

Wikipedia, more so than other wiki service in early 2004, had become a main source for re-distribution of encyclopedic content by other sites, and thus expanded the reach of errors contained in its largely unverified content. Redistribution of Wikipedia-sourced material by another user-editable encyclopedia that could prove more popular with contributors might pose the greatest risk to control by Wikipedia's founding cadre.

Relation to Consumerium

The default position should be that Wikipedia's serious governance problems are so dangerous to Consumerium that they can't be repeated here. The English Wikipedias and Mediawiki are enemy projects in that their goals and values differ so radically from those of Consumerium that any confusion of one set of policies or concept of responsibility on those projects with the policies or responsibilities of Consumerium is a net negative - that is, anyone who says regarding an important governance decision that "X isn't what WE* do on Wikipedia" should be told "right, go away, we're doing it anyway". Or more neutrally, "that's evidence that X is the right thing to do". On governance specifically.

"who's we" on Wikipedia? See community point of view

List of related wikipedia articles

If you see something in wikipedia that could be useful, please put it here, if the Wikipedia article is not complete you should put it in the Research page - Lists and timelines are very welcome.

Understanding buying choices and their effects:

w:Conversion of units
w:GTIN
w:EAN
w:UPC
w:List of countries
w:List of timelines
w:List of reference tables
w:List of stock exchanges
w:List of supermarkets
w:Commodity markets - buying on the largest scale
w:Money - what it is and how it works, commodifying everything even you
w:Tariff

Understanding moral choices as expressed in the marketplace:

w:list of ethics articles - why would you care what you buy?
w:Globalization makes it harder to know what your money does
w:Transparency International tries to make it easier to find out
w:Greenpeace has six campaigns to affect buying choices, and advocates
w:Accounting reform which would make more liabilities visible to you
w:Full cost accounting in particular would make waste visible
w:Means of persuasion, e.g. w:advertising, w:propaganda of
- w:Productivism assumes that everything humans make is good
- w:Consumerism assumes that everything humans want is good

Directly relevant to consumerium mission, making actual moral buying choices:

w:Slow Food - tied for third most relevant? buy local, organic, etc.
w: Sweatshop - tied for third most relevant? often the target of
w: Boycott - second most relevant? usually shorter term than
w:Moral purchasing describes most exactly the consumerium.org mission
w:Local food

Other

brand management, how products are positioned and gain identity. The "Wikipedia" brand has this concern too, leading to:
tracking of Self-references of the project to itself, which Consumerium needs too so it knows what it is and is becoming.
w:Wikipedia:itself which is the view of the english version of Wikipedia from Wikipedia, itself, and is used to mediate disputes about its direction and purposes.