On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnot...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Carmen <yarru...@charter.net> wrote: >> >>> For example, in the encyclopedic Wikipedia, there's one article called >>> Brooklyn Bridge... > > Actually, I've just considered this a bit longer (for my sins). It > occurs to me that perhaps you're not looking at big issues (like > abortion) but you perhaps mean something that would invigorate local > politics? You did give the example of building a bridge after all. > > I suppose that would be an innovation: a wiki that covers political > issues that would be considered "non-notable" on Wikipedia. > > The trouble you're going to have then, though, is participation. How > many people are going to want to join together to create a few pages > detailing the decision to stop the 34B bus service? > > Bodnotbod
This would be a fantastic part of a locally-focused wiki, however. Taking the example of the Davis city wiki (http://daviswiki.org), local politics gets covered there all the time, with heated arguments taking place in the comments! So I suspect the solution for coverage of local issues is to embed them in context, which is more helpful anyway (when you have a site that describes the bridge, the body of water, the city, and the local politicians AS WELL as controversies around any of the above). In other words: all politics is rooted in community; some communities are bigger than others. As for the project proposal, I'd work on clarifying how you expect the wiki aspect to work specifically; it seems like this would be particularly hard to maintain. I suspect any system that limits itself to edits from a small group of people as you seem to propose doing wouldn't work very well. Additionally, I believe there have been a few stabs at similar projects from other groups that you might look at; Andrew Lih's idea for collective news annotation comes to mind, as do others. (As for the Signpost -- publishing full essays in support of project proposals is a bit much, but doing brief writeups of new project proposals on a regular basis in the Signpost seems like a good idea!) best, Phoebe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l