Talk:Edits, votes and bets

This is a better name for the Opinion Wiki discussion. Here's why trolls think so:

1. "Opinion" seems to degrade this function to be less than or less important than or less trusted than that of the "Content Wiki". If so, who needs it? Unless "Opinion" is just "talk:" applied to "Content"...

2. "Wiki" assumes that a certain technology is going to serve this function. That is a premature assumption. What if eBay or prediction market or blog software does a better job of sorting out "opinion" from "content"?

3. The very idea of what is an "opinion" is factionally defined. Someone moving something that one group believes fervently is "True" or "content" to "another place" where it is reduced in status to "opinion" is a power grab. We shouldn't choose names that imply power grabs must or should or will happen.

4. The main issue in debate is the relationship of edits, votes and bets, and how reputation and identity (and potential identity dispute) underlies all three. Until that issue is resolved we should avoid battling over names like "Opinion Wiki" or "The Consumerium Exchange" or "life exchange" which imply certain views. For instance "life exchange" seems to accept John McMurtry's "life capital" view, and "exchange" seems to accept the prediction market approach pioneered by Robin Hanson. It is to important an issue to settle by battling name semantics - it should be debated deeply, and the way edits, votes and bets all express committed views must be dealt with more fundamentally and fairly, without prejudicing language.

5. It's not at all clear that ONE facility will solve ALL these problems - there may need to be a way to associate edits and votes, edits and bets, and bets and votes, and some of these will be so factionally defined as to be incompatible, or considered useless, or even dangerous, by another faction. For instance, a faction that wants to bet on edits and only make changes to the Content Wiki that its members are willing to bet on, is not going to be able to share a communications medium with a faction that wants to do this by one-member-one-vote, or, some combination of all three... a lot of the good old left-right issues are going to re-appear at Consumerium!

More arguments:

6. The words "content" and "opinion" are not used anywhere else, but there is not going to be any way to avoid the words "signal" (as in Consumerium buying signal or healthy signal infrastructure) or "research" (as in research), so rather than add new words that mean nothing, let's use the words that apply that mean something. Likewise for "development" which has a meaning everywhere wikis are used for design purposes before creating some new code, which is everywhere. Never mind even the ampersand (&) which has to go, "R&D" is just not a good name, period.

So, there's going to be a general copying over of useful content into the new name scheme unless some countering for these and the arguments at Talk:Development Wiki appears pretty soon. The name "R&D Wiki" can stay for now as this mediawiki is in fact doing both Research Wiki, e.g. intermediate pages, and Development Wiki, e.g. healthy buying infrastructure design, jobs.

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We should discuss ballot and tolerances versus preferences expression issues, before User:DanKeshet totally destroys the voting articles. Now that Wikimedia is using approval voting, they'll likely damage the articles on that to reflect what they're actually doing, which will probably be something unjustifiable in any sane electoral regime.