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"Hillarycare" would represent a right wing alternative to their existing health care system.

It may be right wing for parts of the world but it's left wing, ie socialist, in the US. And if you think health care is expensive wait until it's free.

Most advanced countries would have to reduce the scope of government involvement (including subtantial privitization) in their health care systems to match what Hillary has proposed.

That's not the Hillarycare I recall. She called for universal health care for everyone, which sounds socialistic "left wing" to me.

Since almost all of these countries have longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, etc. than the USA

Where do you get your data from? According to wiki life expectancy in the US is one of the highest. Out of 191 countries the USA is listed at 29. According to WHO in 2000 the US ranked 24th. While not as high as say Japan, the US has a higher life span than most nations.

Now don't get me wrong, I believe everyone should have access to health care but I believe it's the individual's responsibility. The way the system is rigged in the US is part of the problem with people not being able to afford health insurance. For one thing, because of wage control laws in the US during WWII employers weren't able to offer prospective employees more pay however they were allowed to offer health insurance to employees. Today if employers were allowed to pay employees more without either the employer or employees having to pay more taxes people would be able to buy their own health insurance. This would create more competition in insurance which would lower insurance premiums. In a way Ron Paul's health policy would address this, though not compleatly. Or take Taxol. The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and therefore part of government, spent $183 million to develop and test Taxol as a treatment for certain cancers. After spending all that taxpayer money what did the NCI do? It sold the rights to all of the data needed by the FDA to win drug approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb, BMS, for $43 million, $140 million less than taxpayers paid. And how much does a Taxol course of treatment cost? Several thousand dollars. Yet it cost less than a dollar for BMS to make one dose, and one treatment course takes less than 1000 doses. If the NCI had allowed any pharmaceutical company to use the data to get FDA approval, even if the manufacturers were required to pay say a 10% royalty to the NCI which would allow the NCI to do more research, the cost for treatment with Taxol would be a lot lower.

And "it takes a village" would represent common sense consensus among most societies (apart from the US). Someone who proposed the common US view of "I'm looking out for number one everyone else can go die for all I care" would be thought a dangerous sociopath.

Again I think you may be misunderstanding me, then again I wasn't really clear about it. I do believe in people working together in communities to help each other, voluntarily. What I don't like is anyone being mandated or required to do so, such as by having some of the money they work to earn being taken out to pay taxes. As an example of how I'd prefer it is the old Barn Raising wh

MediaWiki actually uses the number of articles with at least one internal link.

I completely agree. I couldn't have said it better.

"If you don't like it, leave".

Wikipedia in and of itself was a good idea. Now it's full of POV-pushing, elitism (if you want to call it cabalism, be my guest), admins breaking their own rules (they were "voted" to help enforce them, no?), dominance of difficult people, trolls and their enablers, constant infighting, defamatory material etc. I could go on for hours about what's wrong with Wikipedia. The goal of Wikipedia, to have one publicly available collection of knowledge has been twisted so many times, it doesn't even resemble what it should be.

They have strayed from the WikiWay - see http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiWay - which is basically 'the community working toward a common goal'. How can the community work together to do anything if there's fighting and disputes all the time?

Wikipedia Review is mostly a collection of users (both active and former) all with one goal in mind: To criticise Wikipedia and suggest changes for the system. Sure there may be a few people who outright attack but that's not representative of most. Painting one group of people with the same brush is never a good idea.

Bear this in mine, mine is the perspective of someone indefinitely blocked for baseless accusations (because many people thought something was true and had no proof to back it up).

If I leave, everything I've said will still be there and attributable to me long after my views might have changed
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToVanish

I use a different user name on every online forum (except for this one and www.revleft.com). This is a precautionary measure to make it harder to link all my online personas. Of course, it is possible, if you have sufficient computing power and/or access to the machines (and their logs) that I have used. However, for a simple search it is not easy. I have also attempted (well I do now anyway) to create usernames that are not easily found by a simple search (except that "apathy maybe" now comes up for both RevLeft and Slashdot, where as previously it didn't...). Another precaution I take, is to edit forum posts to remove personal information (or else simply not post that information).

Along with the right to vanish, I think that every website should, once the relevant information such as browser stats and geographical stats (if relevant) should delete all their logs.
Privacy is something that has to be fought for by the individual, and by those who control websites and online communities.

Jimbo is listed on his Wikipedia article as "President of Wikia, Inc.; Board member and Chairman Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation".

He's nominally no longer involved in day-to-day editing, because he's an eight hundred pound elephant. (Revert Jimbo and you might wake up with your account banned...) However, he still sticks his nose in every so often, which causes great confusion. Also, he's semi-officially the GodKing of Wikipedia, and acts like it, too. He may blather on about the virtues of openness and accountability (virtues which I happen to believe in), but seems to think that they only apply to lesser folk. (He had no problem keeping his knowledge of Essjay's fraud to himself, for instance. No need for the plebs to trouble their little minds.) Also, he writes hilarious edit summaries like "voting as regular editor".

The upshot of all this is that Jimbo exercises dictatorial authority (though I would argue he doesn't exercise enough to be truly disruptive), but pretends that he doesn't, and in deference to said authority, the community plays along. It's depressing, which is why I keep my edits far away from anything the cabal touches.

Well, there are those situations where society is wrong, and needs to be called on it.

Will society be responsive? That's the question.

If society is not responsive when society is wrong, then this is horrific and terrible and should be opposed.

If society is responsive, then we should welcome our new neighborly overlords.

Example: "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote." Suppose we had this high technology, and it's early 1900's. You and your subversive friend are having a discussion, and whisper that you think women should be able to vote. Obviously, you are trying to create a subversive cell movement; And unfortunately for you, someone with a microphone and a camera caught it, and posted it online. You are visibly and painfully ostracized from society. Anyone who thought at least some bit of sympathy for your way of thinking either changes their mind (against you,) or decides to stay quiet. Because a critical mass of people are able to express their opinion, society is incapable of changing, and the passages of perspective are blocked.

Will society be responsive in our future environment? We do not know. It seems reasonable to believe that the future may resemble a panopticon, but that piece of evidence alone doesn't tell us enough; We don't know what balancing forces may exist.

But, anyways: There's an example of how the system you described might be flawed.

I don't doubt for a second that religious parents will use their vouchers to send their children to a religious school.

What I doubt is that forcing their kids to learn something that their parents, pastors, and friends tell them is nonsense, is going to sway minds, and improve national dialog. I think people will believe what they want to believe, and that parents will continue to indoctrinate their children.

Consider people as embodied ideas, and the attempt to control the thoughts of children (however unsuccessful) can only be viewed as theft of children.

Statements to the effect that "The law ought to require schoolkids to be vaccinated against it" are directly comparable to the belief that the United States should be a Theocracy. The battle that could come of such thinking could only be an armed civil war. I do not believe that the movement of the Enlightenment could stomach such a battle.

The struggle between religious horseshit, and an evolutionary naturalistic spirituality, will have to be won with direct dialog, or it, quite simply, won't be won at all.

This is exactly what I do. Both my public wikis append a section with bogus e-mail addresses, prefixed with a "Guestbook" heading. Google picks these up like candy, and lots of bots use search engines now to find sites that contain many addresses. Normal users don't see these addresses as they are hidden with CSS.

If you want to add this feature to your wiki, check this out:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiPatches/ SpambotPoison

I have my calendar marked "Public" on Google, and there's no way that this silly article is changing my mind.

This is, to me, akin to the old scare about putting your phone number online.

Do any of you remember? The attitude of the 1990's was: Oh My God Jesus Christ, That Man Has His Phone Number Online! Somebody stop that man, he's a menace to himself, and to Society!

Then I read something Philip Greenspun wrote, where he said: (A) I have X,000,000 gajillion hits on my site per day. (B) My cell phone number is featured prominantly on my website. (C) I have only once received a phone call that was unwelcome, but I have far more many times received phone calls that I wanted (due to the posting.)

Personally, I have never received the unwanted phone call.

I think people have a way of inflating plausible threats to themselves, regardless of the actual risks.

In the event (it has to actually happen several times!) that people start using Google Calendars to raid homes, and in the event that it's statistically significant as far as threats go, I will simply wire up my apartment with cams, hard drives, and redundant offsite storage.

Wow, do we work for the same company?? I work for a smallish business that's divided into two offices, one in Canada and one in the US, separated by a two hour time difference, and we've recently incorporated those exact tools into our workflow. IRC has been invaluable, allowing realtime, quick feedback on issues when the need arises without being overly obnoxious (unlike many IM clients). And recently, we've begun making serious use of a Wiki for authoring technical material, as it drastically lowers the barrier for generating and publishing content for consumption by the technical staff.

Incidentally, MeatballWiki has a great page that summarizes the role that wikis can play in a corporate environment here. It's worth a read if you're thinking about deploying something like this.

See also http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RatingGroups

Sorry for jumping on you like that; I'm just a little angry at having been so thoroughly misunderstood.

AHEM:

There are times in the universe when people want to interact live.

As it is, live interaction over the Internet sucks.

There is no good general-purpose interactive platform right now.

Croquet, Second Life-- these are neat places to make things and meet people, but you can't perform a business meeting there, you can't work on code together there, etc., etc.,.

Now, there is a loooonng continuum between "completely live interaction and expectations," and "a web where people send messages in bottles to one another over vast distances in time." That continuum is very long, and it's not at all clear where people will draw lines. Most likely, I believe, software will develop to cover and mediate the whole range of expressions.

Right now, due to the technology, it's almost entirely in the "sending messages in a bottle."

Now, if you believe people are inattentive and have some sort of mindset that says people need to concentrate, meditate, reflect more, not talk live, live slow, etc., etc., - whatever's going on in your personal life or that you observe going on in the social world, fine, fine, fine. I'm not going to bother arguing or talking with you about it right now.

If you're a software developer looking at the world of "what does technology enable, and not enable," then you're who I'm talking with. And surely you will agree: There's no good basically free technology for working live on code with others, having meetings over a share whiteboard, meeting other people who happen to be in the same space with you, etc., etc.,.

As evidence of demand for this stuff, I point you to all the bulletin board systems that tell you who else is online right now. As evidence for the demand for FOAF type stuff, I point you to the explosion of activity there, and I point you to Slashdot's own friend/foe system. If you want to see Wikipedia of the future, I point you to #wikipedia.

People want and need live interaction. We have not been giving it to them.

Technologists have been thinking AJAX is the way to enable this stuff, and making side systems to the web.

I used to be a strong proponent of the approach as well, but just recently I'm having second thoughts. Second Life can be humbling, and when I look ahead into the future, I realize just how archaic our web experience is right now, and how unsustainable the technical platform is. If you're not a web developer, I don't know how useful my post is for you. It's clearly not communicating to people, since they have (wrongly) imagined I think we're all going to be spending all day waiting for people to finish their blog entries.

Now again: If you're in the "slow down" "stop making technology" crowd, we can't have a conversation. If you're in the "computers = distraction = evil / info-overload worries" crowd, then let me say that the problem isn't the amount of communication that's the problem, (we have a deficit in successful communications, actually,) the problem is that the management of communications and the mediation of spaces is the problem.

In material life, we have all these mechanisms for communicating and realizing what kinds of loads people have and are carrying. We can just look at a person, and infer all this information, and make judgements, totally unconsciously. Without all the paralanguage, we can't do much.

Communicating paralanguage is an increase in communication. Just because it's not words, doesn't mean it's not communication. Back again to "the problem is organizing communications, not the amount of communication." That's where we get wikipedia and social bookmarking and all these things. Again, it's organizing communication,

Get free karma here.

The things people put online and the security of certain systems is mind-boggling.

Eh...

Not so scary, really.

I figure the man already has my street address and phone number and stuff. What's the big deal?

People are always telling me: "You are putting your info online! You are gunna be in big trouble, Mister!"

I chalk it up to Vanity Fear. "I'm so important/beautiful, my powerful enemies/obsessive stalkers can't have my (street address, phone number, email address.)"

Philip Greenspun has had his cell phone number online for at least a decade. He's almost certainly more powerful than you are. And let's not even begin with his enemies. And yet he reports only getting 1 or 2 annoying calls.

No, this is exactly right!

You should have to overcome some sort of speed bump, letting you know: "Hey, if you do this thing, you might be breaking the law. Think about it."

But you should still be able to overcome the hurdle. Because, "who knows?" You might actually have the right, it might actually be okay.

Besides: Some laws, you should be able to make the decision to break or not to break. Not all laws, but some laws. For the simple act of copying a file on your computer, you should be the person deciding what to do. But there should be some small barrier to transgress.

It's like the line of rocks on the side of the road at the park. "Please don't cross over this," it tells you. You can, and some do, but most don't.

It's called Soft Security, and it works great. It's all about respecting people, and respecting boundaries. Most people are pretty respectful, and things seem to work. People talk, people have ideas about what is right and wrong, and people don't violate things just willy nilly, provided that there are some cues and attention.

No, this is exactly right!

You should have to overcome some sort of speed bump, letting you know: "Hey, if you do this thing, you might be breaking the law. Think about it."

But you should still be able to overcome the hurdle. Because, "who knows?" You might actually have the right, it might actually be okay.

Besides: Some laws, you should be able to make the decision to break or not to break. Not all laws, but some laws. For the simple act of copying a file on your computer, you should be the person deciding what to do. But there should be some small barrier to transgress.

It's like the line of rocks on the side of the road at the park. "Please don't cross over this," it tells you. You can, and some do, but most don't.

It's called Soft Security, and it works great. It's all about respecting people, and respecting boundaries. Most people are pretty respectful, and things seem to work. People talk, people have ideas about what is right and wrong, and people don't violate things just willy nilly, provided that there are some cues and attention.

It appears you want a wiki that discusses the same topics you find discussed often on Slashdot. If you like Slashdot, and you like Wikipedia, then you might also enjoy the patterns wiki, the meatball wiki, or the infoanarchy wiki.

Meatball Wiki page on GopherProtocol
A copy of the Gopher FAQ
MacOrchard page with TurboGopher VR

The Planeshift license page states that the developers use a proprietary license for all game content, making only the actual program code open source. While they use practical-sounding phrases like "keeping resources" and "maximizing chances of success", this is clearly acknowledged as a way to keep people from forking the project (by making it impractical to do so).

One of the primary freedoms afforded by the GPL and other FOSS licenses is the right to fork. Without the ability to fork, a project can die or stagnate if the leaders lose interest or turn into assholes, even when there are other interested people who would be willing to keep that project alive. In other words, the ability to fork gives you "The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3)."

IMHO, any project that claims to be open source but deliberately attempts to prevent forks should be regarded with suspicion.

is it still september?

whiteboard of the internet

like the whiteboard in your hallway, except that it's online, it's for text instead of drawing (usually), it's hyperlinked, and it archives all of the content and lets you "diff" between versions. wikis in this mode can be used by a project team to keep track of ideas and to share documents like to-do lists

message board/usenet newsgroup, but more organized

wikis can act like a message board, except that instead of posts being organized by date, they are organized by subject. this lessens the tendency of the community to rehash old conversations every few months -- instead of old conversations being buried in the archives, they are still right there on the relevant wiki page.

see MeatballWiki for a great example of a wiki which is used to discuss things without old topics being "buried in the archives".

incidentally, a discussion on the relative strengths of discussion board software and wikis for the task of holding an online discussion can be found at CommunityWiki:DiscussionBoardVsWiki

I've installed UseMod which is a nice stable and clean Perl-based wiki. Of the ones that I tried this had the most intuitive defaults. Installation took about 10 minutes.
--
CuTest

Methinks the "ever-extensible Kwiki implementation" needs a "slashdotting" extension.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

Isn't Carmack a big Snowcrash http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SnowCrash fan?

I wouldn't be surprised to see id produce a MetaVerse MMOG.

Your example is a ridiculous analogy. A better analogy would if someone called something a transportation system, which is about as general and open ended as "an online community website designed for friends". A transportation system could be a train, a car, a plane, a boat, i.e., many things. It could refer to roadways or railways or sea routes. Likewise "an online community website designed for friends" can refer to many things, not just blogs.

So, really, I think that your reading specificity into a generalized statement is what is odd. You seem to be arguing that all online communities are blogs. Is Usenet a blog? Was the WeLL a blog? I suppose you could argue that they were, but that no one had come up with the catchy name of blog until now.

See MeatBall:ElectronicDemocracy for relevant links.

I particularly draw your attention to NetConference Plus, and to Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy wiki section.

Also, there is a wiki effort to become a virtual nation state, called AnewGo, although it's quiescent right now.

Finally, I've just begun work on a software inference engine, Parliament, that would assist in the application of parlimentary procedure to an online legislative body. The core engine could also be used as an assistant to humans during a live meeting (which is in fact the way that I'm developing it first).

Yep. Wiki is my preference, although I use a somewhat modified UseMod Wiki (I have tried TWiki in the past and found it a bit too much-- plus, IIRC, it has kinda goofy markup compared to what you see most places).

The biggest thing I found lacking in UseMod was the ability to have a little "front page" blurb about recent changes, so I hacked one up. This allows the front page to contain links to my journal entries and keep visitors up to speed on the important stuff that's new since last visit. I have some other plans for additional hacks... and one that just occurred to me that would be really handy is a way to build photo galleries just using the Wiki.

I am playing devils advocate here but why, in every press release of companies who migrate to Linux, do they only mention licencing costs?

I have never seen a press release from a company who has said "we moved to linux on the desktop because its better", normally its "we moved to linux on the desktop because of concerns about the pricing of Microsoft licences".

ps. Note to mods hovering over the -1: Definition of devils advocate is worth reading first.

Jimmy Wales (the founder) donates the bandwidth, the hosting space, and the time of one of his employees for hardware installation, but the new servers are additional cost that's coming from the third-party donations to the foundation.

If he were to just go kayaking with the money and leave us serverless, well you'd hear about it. ;) Wikipedia is under the GNU Free Documentation License, and were there a real reason for it the community could fork the project, taking the content with them and outdoing the original site.

See MeatBall:RightToFork.

Well if its for an English class, get them to do something interesting witht a wiki. Weblogs are all well and good but people get enough practice critiquing others work.

With a Wiki you could see how they go when they have to work together to get something done. Simple wiki software such as UseMod, might not cut the mustard but you could try setting up a PediaWiki based site for them to work with.

I'd imagine that there would be lessons in online anonymity to be learnt here as well....

Well, slash is good and I am a slashdot addict. But I prefer wikis to build something together.

In "The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet", Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (c2.com) describe two ways of interacting in a wiki : content pages (as found on wikipedia) and discussion threads (there are many of them on MeatballWiki).

Most wireless communities use wikis. And it is fun! :-)

But, I agree, ...it is another book. ;-)

Usemod is another popular wiki, and there are dozens more WikiEngines, many of them licensed open/free.

There's also the book, The Wiki Way.

You could probably build something on top of Zope (which comes with a ZWiki component), and might find a href="http://www.gzigzag.org/

I am guessing that someone could write a plugin for any wiki system todo the pointless little map of information with little lines on it

I think any wiki clone will be more appropriate. Try
phpwiki
(in perl) usemod wiki.
There are dozens more clones.

1. Knowledge changes over time.
   
2. Connections between topics are central to understanding.
   
3. Each person has something to contribute. It's important to keep the participation threshold low.
   

i copied and summarized some of this thread to MeatballWiki at page CopyrightAlternatives

A couple of points (from a Wikipedian):

1. Wikipedia currently uses the GNU Free Documentation License; we didn't formulate our own.

2. Wikipedia isn't a general content repository, but an encyclopedia project. The project welcomes articles on all topics under the sun, but entire books aren't our mandate.

That being said, anyone can set up a wiki and develop any type of content. All you need is a webserver and some software. Wikipedia uses UseModWiki, which is written in Perl and is under the GPL. --Stephen Gilbert

look at the other comments. a lot of people have used word, and it's worked well for most of them. myself included.

I would link mine, but I don't want to hurt my poor dsl line. However I always found this link useful for info on what a wiki is.

Basically it is an anonymous / identified community (however the user chooses usually) that allows usually all, sometimes most, pages to be edited by anyone else. Quite fun. Peer review is an explanation of why people don't screw the whole thing up. Also all documents can be rolled back.

The Wiki Wiki Web is a set of editable, cross-referenced web pages. Anybody can view them and anybody can edit them, and they are searchable. Wikis are pretty useful for internal documentation projects. It should be possible to extend the concept to add the security that is typically required and to add support for XML. Of course, all that means I am practically suggesting you write your own custom Wiki, which may take too long for you. But you could probably start with an existing Wiki and get good results. I have set up UseModWiki (which is a CGI script written in Perl) and gotten good results.

Hope this helps!

For an algorithm that I think works to do as you wrote above, you can see my report on limited knowledge purchasing.

Yes! Anyone who's interested in working on a free/open source WikiBrowser (WardsWiki) WikiBrowser (Meatball) go read and contribute at those links, or contact me. It could be done as a sidebar in browsers that do that, and as a separate app for different OSes. (there's no project yet)

Life,
John

My personal favourite gopher is the WELLGopher.

Finally, be warned about using gopher in current browsers. Since no one cares about gopher any more, the existing clients are rather crashprone.

My personal favourite gopher is the WELLGopher.

Finally, be warned about using gopher in current browsers. Since no one cares about gopher any more, the existing clients are rather crashprone.

If there aren't, I wonder what such a site would require? I'll tell you right now, it will not be anything like a weblog. The whole idea of a static article header followed by comments is totally wrong. As information is acquired, the story should be improved to fit the facts. Retractions are old media.

Actually, I suppose I'm falling back on the idea of wikis. Figures.

If there aren't, I wonder what such a site would require? I'll tell you right now, it will not be anything like a weblog. The whole idea of a static article header followed by comments is totally wrong. As information is acquired, the story should be improved to fit the facts. Retractions are old media.

Actually, I suppose I'm falling back on the idea of wikis. Figures.

Also, there is value in the archive, technically speaking, provided you are interested in reading it. Consider that without archives, there would be demand and no supply. I'd bet you'd want to pay for them then. But, if you don't want the archives, don't pay for them.

On the other hand, if you do want them, the only free (as in liberty) and fair method would be to distribute the cost amongst the users proportionate to their use (as opposed to having some volunteer "sugar daddy" front the cost for you). If there aren't enough people willing to do this, then the only way to maintain the archive would be for some non-public, non-volunteer body to buy it. Then that body should be able to recoup their costs + interest, ethically speaking.

Actually, I think the whole idea that information wants to be free (as in costless) is just wrong.

Now, here's something to think about. The number one security issue is not attacks, trolls and grits lovers. The number one security issue are human mistakes. Most of our security policy revolves around soft security, as it is better to leave community concerns to the community and not to a powerful few. And over time we will only improve the community with simple systems like KeptPages.

Unfortunately, an online community is about communication. It's easier to communicate with 100 people than the 200 000. In fact, you compsci folk already understand the connected graph squaring problem. Sucks, eh?

But, I think, I think that the way out is to use the graph density against itself. If you give people the freedom to manage the system, I think a good community structure will emerge. Moderation systems imposed by the site seem disjunctive, not driving the members to solve problems collectively. This is bad. The community must build itself.

Anyway, as always this is a technology solution vs. community solution dilemma. And I'll bet that you're wrong, Signal11. I'll bet that if you let the whole community help itself, there are a lot more people interested in making it work than don't.