[Campaigns-l] Wikipedia and Campaigns in the same namespace... was "Languages"

[Jennifer M.]

On 8/2/06, YYK H <y2keynes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In the meantime the local namespace of a single city's worth of data
> will
> > (this has been my experience editing campaigns wikia making me wish
> > "politics" was just a new kind of content in wikipedia) *probably*
> reference
> > many facts and concepts with broad relevance and applicability.  Do you
> want
> > a wiki where 80% of the links are to other wikis with broader scope?  If
> it
> > were technically feasible I'd argue in favor of *only one* wiki with
> > automatic translation progating edits back and forth between language
> > versions (or to a central artificial language representation encoding
> all
> > the info necessary for all the different natural language versions of
> the
> > text).
> Um... may be I have misunderstood the concept of campaigns wikia... To
> my understanding this wikia is a platform of idea exchange on politics
> and intelligent discussion... which unavoidably would be fill with POV
> (I mean... isn't that what politic is?)  To make these POV thoughtful
> and relevant, they should be backup by facts...so to me, pretty much
> 100% of the links would be external leaving only POVs from all sides
> on the page.  I don't' know... this is how I see intelligent
> discussion and exchange can occurs... I mean, if we want facts and
> concept, wikipedia in itself is already an excellent source, so may be
> I am totally off.


The trick is that the facts themselves are sometimes in dispute, especially
when they have relevance to controversial issues.  It would be nice if we
could have "neutral fact" pages intermixed with the "pages full of opinions"
where people just coming from an opinion page full of "readiness to edit"
find a place where such edits are welcome.

The most elegant solution from my perspective would be to just add
"political pages" to Wikipedia itself.  They wouldn't be part of "the
encyclopedia" they would be parallel to it in the same name space.  If
wikipedia is ever printed out "as an encyclopedia" then you leave the
political stuff out.

One thing to mention is that having political content "right next to" the
other content is likely to make "factual articles" more likely to be edited
by more people with more diverse opinions.  For example if you look at the
Liquid Democracy pages on Wikipedia versus Campaigns, campaigns already has
better content on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Liquid_Democracy

Admittedly the Campaigns version has opinions mixed in, but if the page was
split into background versus opinions the Campaigns "Issue Backgrounder"
would be a superior article for wikipedia to use as an encyclopedia entry.
I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened to many "issue related
factual subjects" that "encyclopedists" don't think are worth lots of
attention but political people do.

-Jennifer
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