Consumerium Research pilot
A Consumerium Research pilot would build an actual Research Wiki prototype with real intermediate pages describing real companies and their mis/behaviour. It would focus deliberately only on the worst behaviour by the most litigous companies, as a test of policies. If the pilot were to pass the scrutiny of lawyers for McDonald's and Monsanto and Disney (well known as the world's meanest!) and so on, it would be fairly likely that lawyers of other firms would have to lave us alone.
Such a focused pilot that deliberately sought to gain both publicity and a meaningful test of how tough and sue-proof we can make our policies, would stress organizational issues central to Consumerium Governance Organization. We would identify the potential for being sued for diluting the trademark, libel chill, other more fatuous basis for lawsuits and other potential problems. At the very least we'd learn to process a cease and desist letter and send a polite response threatening total troll war against companies that lie about Consumerium, followed by suing for funding.
In such pilot projects, often the users are chosen specifically to be difficult to support, if the anticipated issue of deployment is the variety of users, i.e. trolls especially funded trolls, in Research Wiki and in Consumerium Governance Organization, and sysop vandalism advocates. In September 2004, supposed advocates of the Sysop Vandal point of view seem to be republishing writings from that POV, e.g. the Craig Hubley article. In some cases they have also indicated an interested in learning about trolling and declared it "fun". This is all possibly a positive sign that at least some alleged sysop vandals (their true self-identification remains unknown) can turn their hate towards companies or people that really deserve it, e.g. Gus Kouwenhoven rather than some trollherd.
To test the extent of these conflicts and the tit for tat tactics they engender, we need an actual Research Wiki up and running; One with real intermediate pages that we can fight about. Elements of this pilot include:
- troll-friendly policies evolving under much factional/legal pressure
- identification of worst practices and the garbage that imports them to a large public wiki, fair ways to ensure these people are driven off by trolls before they can engage in vandalism of subtle or sysop character - see talk:sysop vandalism for a list of known advocates and engagers in this
- writing cease and desist letters to those who defame Consumerium:Itself as a prelude to:
- beginning a self-funding process of suing those who lie about Consumerium, to fund Consumerium Services - starting with Wikimedia or Bomis though they are not ideal targets for suing for funding in the longer run.
One output of such a pilot would be a decision whether to end Wikimedia or work to an negotiated settlement between trolls and Wikimedia regarding who controls the GFDL corpus and to what standards GFDL content will be held. For instance a fixed fee might be charged for every lie about Consumerium or its contributors that is published via Wikimedia forums. In return, Consumerium Governance Organization would agree not to sue for more damages.