Simple model for expressing opinions

Opinions can be expressed by individual users (reviews and voting) and organisations (campaigns and voting) (be they real or virtual).

The current plan is to integrate Opinion Wiki into Research Wiki and this is the simple model for figuring out how much support/resistance each expressed opinion has

Individual consumers

Writing and "registering" reviews

Each user of Research Wiki can make reviews of products, companies, countries etc. but they must do so within their own User-space.

User:SomeUser/reviews/Descriptive name of review incl. reviewed entity and stance taken article is freeform text and the User is assumed to take responsibility for what s/he writes. The name of the review can include a score but definitive for stating the score given by the reviewer to the revievee is determined by examining the first link in the article which should point to (for a product) to Product:SomeProduct/Reviews/Score where score is an integer within the range from Minus3 to Plus3.

Now the "what links here" from (say Product:SomeProduct/Reviews/Plus3 for example) can be used to detect the reviews respectively of their given score and the backlinks and calculation of total average score and number of reviews of certain score for the Publish Wiki

Special User:Anonymous coward will be reserved for anonymous users and trolls to do their reviews. The Lowest Troll reserves the right to treat anonymous and registered users differently in the collation and aggregation of data until a CGO is formed to rule on issues arising from anonymous posts.

Language of each review is indicated one of the following ways:

1. User:YourUserName/Reviews/lc/NameOfReviewInRespectiveLangauge where lc is langauge code
2. User:YourUserName/"Reviews" in the respective langauge/NameOfReview
3. linking to Namespace:SomeEntity/"Reviews" in respective language/Score

Thus as "Reviews" is "arviot" or "arvostelut" in Finnish the correct artcle name would be User:SomeUser/Arvostelut/ArvostelunNimi for a review in Finnish. Which of the three above alternatives is used is not decided. The decicion will have to take into account the software performance and user friendliness factors.

Voting for campaigns

For simplicitys sake in the begining only registered users get to vote on Campaigns and they do so by casting their Direct Votes and Indirect Vote via subpages of their user-page ie. by WikiVote so for now nevermind what the above articles state about more complicated schemes for voting. Later on more inclusive voting systems may be introduced.

Linking to any Campaign:SomeCampaignTheyAreRunning/Vote from User:SomeUser/votes will count as a direct vote. Note that you are allowed to vote only once for each Campaign Category.

And... Yes I know there could be problems with Sock puppets and yes we will develop some user parametrisable filter that weeds out likely sock puppets by number of edits and time registered and their ratio. The parameters are best left up to everyone to decide on their own as this makes vote rigging more difficult since it is not known what parameters people are using.

Indirect vote is a vote you cannot use for yourself but you can choose one organisation you give the mandate to use your indirect vote. You do this by linking to the Group:SomeGroup/Vote from a page titled User:YourUserName/Votes/IndirectVote. You may give your indirect vote only to one organisation (real or virtual) that has registered itself as an organisation within the Research Wiki. You may change your choice of organisation any time.

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Organisations

Voting

Any organisation that has received one or more Indirect Votes may start voting on campaigns with the power of all those indirect votes given to it by linking to Organisation:YourOrganisation/Vote from the users indirect vote page.

Only one campaign in each campaign category may be voted at one time and it can be changed any time.

Who has the right to use the votes of an organisation is up to the organisation to decide. In case you feel that your voting page (or other pages) require protection and/or limited access by chosen users you must contact Consumerium:Staff about arranging this. Arrangements require at least one representative of the organisation to be a Verified User. See that article on how that is done.

Votes are simply cast by linking from Organisation:YourOrganisation/OurVotes to Campaign:SomeCampaign/Vote

Organisation's right to transfer it's voting power to another organisation is undecided.

Campaigning

Campaigning is done only by organisations be they real or virtual.

Virtual ad hoc organisations for running campaigns may be formed by at least two real or virtual organisations, virtual organisations is an ad hoc name for describing an entity that exists only within Consumerium. Suggestions for a better name (Wiki Group?) are welcome.

Campaign leader is the organisation that maintains the campaign and assumes responsibility for any claims made in the campaign thus the campaigns are in the form of Campaign:DescriptiveCampaignName where the first link to Entity:SomeEntity/Campaigns/Score (where score is an integer from Minus3 to Plus3). This first link is used to determine the target of the campaign and the score of the campaign.

It is yet unclear whether we should allow for multiple targets with different scores for each score where some target could receive a negative score and some other target could receibe a positive score.

Campaign:DescriptiveCampaignName/Vote must be properly set up to receive Direct Votes to gain more weight for the campaign.

All the indirect votes of the organisation running the campaign are automatically credited to their own campaigns thus you cannot vote for other campaigns in the same campaign category as the campaigns you are running.

Any Virtual Groups you join in with other organisations automatically get your votes in the categories they campaign in. It is up to organisations to make sure they aren't accidentally running multiple campaigns in one campaign category due to being part of virtual groups. This will be enforced.

Forming a virtual group with other organisations with stakes in some campaign is used to gain more weight for the campaign. The campaigners indicated in Campaign:SomeCampaign/Campaigners share the responsibility of campaign statements truthfullness and assume the legal liabilities that may follow. Failure to do so may lead to the campaign being retired to avoid Consumerium:Itself being sued.

Campaigns may or may not correspond with "real world" campaigns. Real world and "only Consumerium" campaigns may get different treatment/listing ie. they may be presented in separate listings.

--Juxo 18:16, 4 Nov 2004 (EET)