[Foundation-l] Wiki Activism (Project Proposal)

Sat May 20 00:19:02 UTC 2006

Nicholas Barry wrote:

>WikiActivism is a project for past and present social movements such as the Civil Rights movement, Animal Rights movement, and the blooming Immigrant Rights movement. The meat and potatoes of the project will be a page for each separate movement. The majority of pages (great in number, though less important than the main page for each movement) will list evidence used by or against each movement, organizations associated with each movement, and other such items. (Most links on each page will probably go to Wikipedia for explanation of various terms and issues.)
>
The strongest argument against having this as a Wikimedia project is 
that it would be necessarily supporting points of view.  Perhaps 
Wikicities would be a better place for this.

I do think that the underlying concept is interesting in terms of 
opening up how we can do politics politics differently.  I even 
suggested after France and Holland voted down the European Constitution 
that a wiki would be an excellent medium for writing a People's European 
Constitution.  But even if you would limit your efforts the movements 
that you enumerate each could give rise to whole project in itself.  The 
blooming immigrants in the United States are currently a very hot topic.

Doing politics differently requires an ability to look over the curve of 
the horizon, and to synthesize a consensus.  I don't know that your 
proposal can accomplish this, but good luck!

Ec