Anarchopedia:1st General Meeting/Rev 22's paper
Ultimately, I believe the success of Anarchopedia as a project will depend solely on our motivation and our ability to organize the community and the content. The meeting can be useful to develop new ideas and coordinate our efforts.
My thoughts on Anarchopedia[edit]
Anarchopedia is unique because of its anarchic organizational model. There are other wikis about anarchism, often with a larger user user base, but this is also a wiki for anarchists and other people who really care about individual and societal freedom.
We can show that there is a viable alternative to authoritarian social model and strict rule system of Wikipedia and other collaborative web sites. In my opinion Anarchopedia is closer than Wikipedia to the ideal of a Free Universal Encyclopedia.
APOV/NPOV: I don't think that the Neutral POV policy popularized by Wikipedia and our Anarchist point of view are fundamentally incompatible. The "neutral" point of view of the articles on Wikipedia often has a pro-capitalist or pro-authoritarian bias, which an "Anarchist Point of View", by definition avoids. By identifying and removing this bias it should be possible to write articles that are both neutral and acceptable to anarchists. It is also possible to write articles from a purely anarchist perspective. When (if) there will be unresolvable conflicts over the content of an article, the factions in the dispute can split the article, or simply endorse a specific revision of the article.
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Things we could discuss about at the meeting[edit]
Quality assurance: an encyclopedia is a reference work, so we have to find ways to certify the quality of the articles. A rating system may be a first step toward this goal. Other collaborative journalism or encyclopedic websites (Kuro5hin, Everything2) have employed rating systems successfully. Expecially for scientific articles, we should allow and encourage peer reviews, content endorsement by groups and individuals. Usually people simply place their comments in the talk page, but this is not optimal since:
- the talk page and the article page are not synchronized, so often it is not obvious to which revision or part of the article a particular comment is referring to
- in case of controversial and hotly-debated topics, most readers do not have the time to review the whole talk page or the history of the article
Management of the servers: I agree with the proposal of User:X, we should appoint more people (perhaps with a vote) for managing the server. Also it is very important to make off-site backups of the websites.
Improving the interface, making the Main pages on meta and eng less "overwhelming" (as one user commented on eng:). Also we should differentiate the theme on meta: from that on eng:, so that people don't get confused when submitting articles, and reduce the "corporate" look of the websites. (last suggestion by User:Zach Alexander)
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