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Jimmy Wales Starting Campaign Wikis
Billosaur writes "Jimmy Wales, self-described creator of the Wikipedia, is apparently trying to bring the functionality offered by the Internet encyclopedia to a new realm: politics and political campaigns. He is starting a new website, the Campaigns Wikia, which 'has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.' Sounds intriguing, but one has to wonder if it will be plagued by internecine feuding, punditry, and political manipulation."
"Sounds intriguing, but one has to wonder if it will be plagued by internecine feuding, punditry, and political manipulation" How unlike the home life of our dear Queen.
This kind of thing has been attempted by a Dutch newspaper http://wethepeople.nrc.nl/. The subject under discussion was/is how to go forward with European integration after the people France and The Netherlands had not accepted the proposed constitution. The software used was not really user friendly, and the discussion was channeled by allowing only 3 alternatives to be discussed, but the experiment is interesting, also because some politiicians of name joined it.
At least an initiative like this will bring the discussion more in the open and make the process of policymaking a little more transparent.
"Sounds intriguing, but one has to wonder if it will be plagued by internecine feuding, punditry, and political manipulation"
/. stories in the summary. Let us make up our own damn minds.
No... you provide the facts, we provide the opinion. That's how this works.
I wish people would stop trying to put their own spin on
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Not just any forum - a forum where your carefully worded advocacy of a particular candidate can be vandalised and replaced by the image of a scrotum.
Call me cynical, but this sounds idealistic to me. It is my opinion that in most parts of the world politics stopped being about "serious ideas of inteligent oponents" to transform into:
In a word, mostly propaganda.
Also, I think arguments, hovever intelligent they may be, don't change anything by themselves, but only if people listening to them are actually willing to listen (and I wouldn't bet much on that willingness).
Maybe I'm of this opinion only because I'm coming from one of the countries that was behind the iron curtain; Who knows?
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I think this is a good idea. It looks to have the potential to raise peoples
awareness of the practise of politics and a central area where peoples opinions
on political issues and agendas can be seen in near real time. Much different
than the "write a letter to your congressman" or (in Ireland), "go meet with
your local councillor", where you have to account for the time it takes for
your opinion/issues to filter up and down the food chain.
There is also the "mob mentality", whereby if enough people have the same
views on a certain issue, then it has the potential to sway political thought.
How about developing this further, into a Wiki for other nations and political
regimes similar to (or dissimilar to) Republican Democracy.
Note: Republican here means the method of democracy practised, not the party.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
The nature of politics is so that whoever puts down something in writing in defense of a certain view will be attacked by the most fundamentalist, sharp and no-holds-barred opponents.
The reason for this is that allowing something to be put down on paper in a way implies that the view is "legitimate" - "it has been formulated, therefore it must be viable".
This is again tied to the principle that 'will' weighs ten times that of 'facts' - since nothing can ever be proven or beyond attack in humanistic subjects. The complexity of human interaction is so that any connection can be argued, and any refuted - e.g. if a reduction in alcohol prices is followed by a reduction in drink driving, you can just jump on the (often justified bandwagon) that "A did not cause B, rather third factor C caused B". And the relevance of any historical experience is in doubt, since all situations are fractally different.
For this reason, as stated, "Will" and "Formulation" is what it's all about. Formulate your arguments in a good-sounding way, and go a long way towards having them relied on. Destroy your opponents formulations, and destroy their capacity to influence politics. This is why political information wars now is so heavily dominated by the credibility of sources - if you discount a source as irrelevant (CNN, Sky News, WHO, UN, World Bank, IMF, Grandmothers for AIDS), you implicitly seek to attack their formulations and will. Chains of arguments and logic are much more rarely sought to be attacked, because of the mentioned difficulty of doing so.
Also relevant is that, usually, the more fundamentalist someone's opinions are, the more vehemetly he or she states and fights for them. 'Fundamentalist' doesn't neccessarily imply 'wants to cook with rocks', rather 'unwillingness to consider validity of other points of view'.
The result of these is that you will get a wiki where, occasionally, a Joe Bloggs will come in and formulate an argument - "I think we should add a tax to petrol, so that more people will buy cars that use less fuel", or "I think we should have more work in prisons, so that prisoners can do something good for society and learn something useful as well".
This will immediately be pounced on by said fundamentalists, and utterly destroyed. As in, Joe Bloggs is made to look like a fool and an ass. Note that the chain of arguments is impossible to attack, since society is too complex to predict an entire chain of causality and morality - it may well be that positive results _will_ happen with few adverse consequences. Because this is impossible to prove or refute, the destruction of Joe Bloggs will simply rather happen through an appropriately shaped rhetorical package, approximately three times the length of his post (length matters). By destroying Bloggs' formulations in the easiest way possible, you implicitly destroy his will and influence to try those formulations in real life. Joe Bloggs predictably leaves.
For this reason, any 'political' blog is very likely to end up with a lot of posturing, a lot of rhetorical barbs and kicks on the shin, a lot of attacks on formulation sources ("was this proposed by X? I think that says it all"), very little actual intellectual discussion of causality and morality, and only containing people with a combination of rhetorical acuity and enough fundamentalism in their guts to supply the stamina to write every day.
I've got bad news: groupthink sites like wikipedia generally don't bring out the best and most intelligent ideas. Generally a new bright idea is only going to be shared by a few people, and a democratic process will squash those ideas. Combine this with the fact that a majority belief in a statement doesn't make it true and you have serious problems for a site that wants to create an intelligent debate. For a more detailed analysis of the failings of sites like wikipedia see this article.
Philosophy.