User:Nyarlathotep/wikiblog

I'm interested in setting up a wikiblog site here. Its primary purpose is to provide a wiki for commentary on wikipedia & wikinews articles, but it would also allow the following: In all situations, the goal of the site is to develop an "ideal dialog" about a specific topic, such as one treated in a wikipedia or wikinews article.
 * 1) Blogging & oped pieces (ala kuro5hin.org).
 * 2) mindless link propogation (ala metafilter.org)
 * 3) User: namespace diaries.

There would be no NPOV policy, unlike wikimedia projects. Instead, all content should be labeled by a list of authors, via an author= field in the article or comment header. All editors are considered to have equal rights to any article or comment with their name attached. The views of the authors of an article or comment are consider to establish the "policy" for that article or comment, i.e. an authors view trumps any other editors. However, other editors are always free to start another comment. More users may be added to the authors field of an article or comment header, but existing authors have veto power over the addition.

There would, however, be a specilized NPOV "user" (or article & comment type) which means anyone is equal, but NPOV must be observed. There will be a procedure for the NPOV article type to "trump" ordinary authored articles via a consensus poll to turn the original POV article into the first comment on a new NPOV article. In a POV article, the NPOV comment should always be listed first. Other article types, such as debate, might be workable too.

The notion of an "ideal dialog" is extremely problematic. For example, users will rearange comments as a form of moderation, provided they preserve the flow of the dialog. It should be possible to objectively determine if a comment is entirely superseded by another; hence users may try merge other users comments, although authorship takes precidence. It will, however, be impossible to descide what comments are worth including, for various reasons. This problem will be solved by allowing "moderation by category" of comments, via a "Conditional Display" MediaWiki extension.

The "Conditional Display" MediaWiki extension adds several tags, such as &lt;set name="value"&gt; and &lt;if test&gt; ... &lt;/if&gt;, and maybe &lt;unless test&gt; ... &lt;/unless&gt;. Here test could be = or !=, as well as "category:" and "!category:" whose state is determined by the categories in the current article.

Here is an example of how this all plays out: I add &lt;set troll=1&gt; to my User:Nyarlathotep/Preferences file; which is transcluded to all article pages which I view. Now anyone can surround a trollish comment with &lt;if troll&gt; ... &lt;/if&gt;, and it will be hidden from most users, but I will still see it.

Here is another example: if I lack a sence of humor, I could say &lt;set funny=0&gt;, and all content surounded by &lt;if !funny&gt; ... &lt;/if&gt; would disapear.

Thoughts? Nyarlathotep 03:20, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Sounds intereasting. a few thoughts From the top of my head:


 * 1) Possibly some overlap with http://wikireason.org (However I think this will probaly be minimal)
 * 2) Popularity would be the biggest issue. If this was intergrated w/ wikimedia sites I think it would be a great hit. but how would users hear about it. This is especially problamatic (IMO) for this type of site as it would need Critical mass to work well.

Other then that, how long t'll it opens? ☺ wikinews:user:bawolff 06:35, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the overlap with wikireason / wikibate could be significant, but I don't think wikireason wants to allow humerous or less structured content, and such less structured content is a major component of online "dialog." In particular, wikireason would be an excessively constraining forum for discussions spawned by wikinews stories.

My own personal goal is more just to prove that, for anything a blog can do, a wiki can probably do it better. I think others will take the moderation ideas further once they've basicallly been proven; such as creating a proper wikimedia wikiblog site, or adding the necissary extensions to the wikinews server. I don't know much about wikis functioning below the critical mass, but I think you need a working demo before you have any shot. :) And I'd like to get the "moderation protocoll" at least vaguely right on the first go.  Anyway, I'm sure we could have a "discussion" template on wikinews which linked here, once this works.  I'll try to get the extensions together in the not too distant future, and formally submit the proposal here at wikicities.  I'll let you know when it happens.  Nyarlathotep 21:09, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)