User:Jukeboksi/Thinking aloud

So...

This is just thinking aloud, so there are bound to be lots of errors and nonsense

There has been some complaints about The Consumerium Exchange being a misleading name for the facility, which is about experessing opinions and support or the lack of for the expressed opinions and I have noted this problem that it does not translate well at all, so I propose a new working title: Wikinion with the etymology being quite apparent: WIKI based articulation of opiNIONs. This is in no way "set in stone" due to that this wiki has arrived at a state of incoherence in other words this is a mess and it's largely due to that we started out without any clue on naming conventions or when to write stuff in one article and when to split it to many articles.

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As mentioned in Campaign there is an initial thought of campaign management by wiki which would be easy for the campaigners.

Thinking about this approach I came to the realisation that why not extend the use of wiki beyond just campaign management so that majority of the user interface to The Consumerium Exchange would be wiki based.

Basic Outline of Wikinion

Here goes an initial outline of how it would work:

Namespaces

• User - no offending usernames please
• Group - must correspond to a real-world registered entity
• VirtualGroup - must not conflict with names of real-world entities
• Campaign - preferably descriptive names

Set articles and permissions

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/MyVotes - every link from here to voting pages will be counted as a vote for the campaign

Group

• Group - creation of group pages only by registering within the Vault.
• Group/Keys - keys used for signing articles (optional)
• Group/OurVotes - every link from here to voting pages will be counted as a vote for the campaign
• Group/Members - All Group articles editable by those Users listed in this article.
• Group/Affiliations - Listing affiliations with Companies and other organisations
• Group/FOAF - With sections Friend, Foe and Neutral. Links to other Groups and VirtualGroups with freeform explanations

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/OurVotes - every link from here to voting pages will be counted as a vote for the campaign
• 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
  • Group
  • VirtualGroup
• VirtualGroup/FOAF - With sections Friend, Foe and Neutral. Links to other Groups and VirtualGroups with freeform explanations

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/MyVotes
  • GroupName/OurVotes
  • WikiGroupName/OurVotes

More on Wikinion

• 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 Country 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 Wikinion:

1. Anonymous access
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
5. Access protected by GnuPG signatures on save with keys verified by a third party or Consumerium Vault
6. Access protected by GnuPG signatures on save with keys verified by third parties and Consumerium Vault

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And on...

One or Two wikis?

Suppose two wikis, I'll call them Wikinion and Wikitent as working titles for WIKI for expressing opiNIONs and WIKI for conTENT. And I know, totally silly names, but for the time being.

This has advantages:

• Better scalability
• Better security (HTTPS?) for Wikinion without performance losses in Wikitent
• Differentiated sysops
• What else is there

and disadvantages:

• Distinct Recent Changes (could be hacked to show both in one view)
• Double login (can maybe be avoided by sharing the session)
• Checking link correctness is more work (could be hacked too)
• Differentiated sysops
• What else is there

I hear that OpenFacts have done something like session sharing with multiple wikis with MediaWiki. Must inquire them about their solution and experiences