[Campaigns-l] Welcome; getting down to work :)

[Jimmy Wales]

Welcome!  Wow, I caused a bit of a stir. :)

There are over 350 people subscribed to this mailing list now, and more
subscriptions coming in already.  For now, I will keep the list
unmoderated, so let's all please be very respectful of volume... keep it
down as much as possible, because for one thing, we want to not just
talk on the mailing list, but start building something on the wiki. :)

I intend to copy everyone in a day or two as well to an
announcements-only list so that if the volume here gets too high, people
can choose to leave here but choose to stay on the low volume list just
to stay in touch.

So first a few words about 3 sections that I think we can and should
build on the site, all of which seem to me to be equally important...

1. Invitations and instructions and guidance for volunteers and
campaigns to get started building their own wikia sites.  I suspect we
will quickly learn from some brave experimenters what kinds of things on
each of those sites makes the most sense.  (Position papers and meetup
planning are two examples that seem obvious to me.)

2.  Issues - neutral (VERY IMPORTANT!!!) presentations of various
campaign issues, the point here is to give voters a place to come for
basic information about active issues... this differs from Wikipedia
articles on the same issues, because we are not talking about a full
encyclopedia article, but more of a "voter guide" to the issue.

3. Voter guide to candidates - neutral (VERY IMPORTANT!!!) presentations
of all candidates, broken down by region, office, etc.... also different
from Wikipedia in that these are neutral statements about the candidate
from the point of view of learning about them for the current election,
i.e. more of a focus on campaign platform.  We may want to consider as
well trying to do a pair of "pro" and "con" sidebar articles...

---

for me what make sense is that the central Campaigns Wikia site should
be informational and nonpartisan and neutral, and focussed in a very
strong way on outreach and involvement... helping ordinary people learn
how to get involved.

Then, individual campaign wikias are a totally different matter.  Here
the social norm for each of these should be that they are *supportive*
of the candidate... these are social spaces *for the supporters*.  I am
pretty sure that if we work hard to generate a wiki spirit, we will see
good people of various political persuasions working in good faith to
help even people of different political persuasions to build better sites...

Anyway, welcome, this is pretty cool. :)



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