Charter/Sources/Visions
This page describes only your unrealistic visions for the wikipedia. Visions are extreme hallucinatory daydreaming, too-good-to-be-true ideals with high impact but no measurable probability - because they can't happen. They're fantasy. No one believes in them. Not even you. They're fiction.
The ideal vision is something you have never admitted to anybody at all, for fear they would laugh at you or drastically degrade you to other people for "not being realistic" or "ignoring reality" or some such cynical claim.
If you have ever heard a truly compelling vision of what the world could be "if only..." from anyone else in your life, this is the place to finally write it down. Anonymity is best since you may hold back if others know your name. A good vision would contain fantasy elements from all utopias you ever believed in, and several that you laughed at, and riduculed other people for.
If you are describing something that you consider a reasonable goal, that you believe can ever actually happen to any substantial degree, or has a measurable probability, it is a best cases and not a "vision". Be very careful with this distinction - best cases are something we allocate real w:human capital and (indirectly) w:natural resources to get done... a single good vision, however, would break us, were we even to really attempt it.
Enter examples of visions that far exceed anything ever considered as The Future of Wikipedia, include all of the compatible best cases, and render wiki immune to all threats in the bargain.
The few language-using w:Great Apes and the last w:Stone Age Amazonians become the honorary editorial board, new editors have to prove their subject is relevant to their satisfaction, and wiki moves its legal headquarters into the w:Amazon rainforest for tax reasons. A working wiki editorial board from w:civil society grows into a functioning w:world government using wild rainforest acres as its banking standard - the more of these you preserve, the richer you are. Aliens finally reveal that this level of wisdom was what they were waiting to see before they revealed themselves. All medical technology and body modification methods are revealed to humans who can take their place among civilized species of the universe. Offhand, an alien ambassador admits that all humans would have been tortured to death in medical experiments if not for wiki deciding to "respect the next species up the ladder the way that you wanted to be respected by us superior types". Everyone gets a good laugh out of the last w:particle accelerator being turned into a new age gambling casino... and golfers voluntarily give up the game, gollums give up AI and nanotech, in favor of dancing, singing, gardening, extremely creative sex, vegan cooking. Great articles on all these things with step-by-step instructions appear in wiki, so fast that no one could keep up, and they are edited and improved by cliques oriented around value systems who each keep their own fork of wiki. Vocabulary is miraculously kept low enough that a very clever ape or very dumb human or someone who learned English from w:Zero Wing can understand the instructions.
- Also, all of these people, primates and extraterrestrials realize that Wikipedia is not Wiki. :)
w:Wikipedians never sling personal insults at each other, no matter how much they disagree. NOTE: this vision is much harder to achieve than the other two, since it conflicts with various personal agendas.
At some point, perhaps at Version 2.0, the Wikimedia Foundation engraves the entire contents of Wikipedia and Wiktionary in all languages onto a number of stone tablets. This is done in honor of Wikipedia's Ptolemaic heritage and to preserve the entire accumulated encyclopedic knowledge of humanity. The initial goal is to send the tablet sets (lithipedias) for each individual language to their language's native region; with the help of a generous donor, however, the Foundation is able to provide each country with lithipedias in their primary languages.
A series of proposals are developed and submitted to the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Through coordination on Meta and the agencies' gracious support, a set of lithipedias suitable for especially harsh conditions is produced, each to be sent on one of several interstellar probes. Luminaries wax about achieving the noble goals of preserving history for humankind and educating races across the galaxy (as yet still undetected). Wikipedians look to the future with hope.
This hope is to be short-lived, however. International tensions are high; a country formerly known as the United States of America (now officially the Democratic States of America) and referred to by most other countries as the "rogue states of America", "Rogue States", or simply "The States" has become increasingly arrogant and authoritarian in all affairs. Confident in its supremacy and resentful of other countries' policies, it claims governance of the United Nations and declares war upon the European Union when they oppose.
The survivors of this war, the largest in history, are few. Area denial measures far outlast the combatants; a critical level of damage is reached and then exceeded. In two months civilization collapses across the world. As hundreds of millions starve, the last desperate battles are fought until exhaustion.
In the decades that follow, the lithipedias prove their worth and are looked on as an endless, tragic fount of knowledge. Lifespans are short, however, and soon the previous civilizations gain legendary, then mythical status. It is as though humanity had risen against the gods and been destroyed for so doing; the lithipedias are believed to have been created by the gods afterward so that a new and wiser civilization might emerge.
It is in this setting, then, that one of the probes returns to Earth. The excited witnesses to its descent from the heavens eventually discover how to open it, finding a single, familiar stone tablet inside. They bring it to their LithiReader at once, and wait for the new message from the gods to be revealed.
Frustrating weeks pass as the Reader searches the tablet for the wisdom contained within. Eventually cursing his eyesight, he travels to the village of another Reader, who is also unsuccessful. She remembers a term used in certain rare texts, though, a term whose literal meaning was clear but which no Reader had been able to explain in any language of the lithipedia.
In time, similar tablets were found. Readers came to loathe the blank pages for the time they wasted, but still more they hated the tablets filled with indecipherable scripts. Thus, when the Outsiders finally arrived, humanity knew them as Vandals or Trolls and they were met with enmity rather than friendship.
References
Adapted from the Meta-Wikipedia article, "visions" http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/visions , used under the GNU Free Documentation License.
