Proposal:Netizen/Wikisociety

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Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

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1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Summary

Turn the wikipedia community into a democratic society with "political" parties.

Proposal

Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy — but why not? One could promote a political system in order to learn about the possibilities and shortcomings of an online system. The Wikimedia Board of Trustees could delegate decision-making power as seen appropriate to the bodies of the democratic system.

Philosophycracy

In a large democracy one could, at least occasionally, institute the "rule of philosophical positions", which means individuals could only argue according to their philosophical position and not take arbitrary positions on a whim. This might demand more discussion to establish what follows from which philosophical positions but would reduce the signal noise once the relevant dependencies had been established.

(The humorous opposite of philosophycracy is, of course, prejudicracy, the rule of prejudice and whim. Philosophycracy is also "beyond criticism", not because you are for some reason unable to criticize but because criticism has been dealt with in advance — "in the past")

Citizenship education curriculum

One could develop a citizenship education curriculum and grant "Netizen" status (or something similar) only to persons who have completed the required courses on Wikiversity.

Motivation

• Citizenship education could be seen as a moral obligation, including education for online communities like that of the Wikimedia Foundation.
• An advantage would be that the Wikimedia Foundation and its community could learn about issues of citizenship education that may become relevant for cooperations with schools, especially schools who emphasize democracy any may be interested in the use of wikis to do so.

Key Questions

• What issues could be delegated to the community and
• is there sufficient interest to implement more democratic structures?

References

• Proposal talk:Solicited advertisement/en#Open Directory Project (clicks4charity.net, kaioo.com)
• Liquid democracy (Wikipedia)
• http://www.communitywiki.org/en/LiquidDemocracy
• heise.de: German pirate party introduces intraparty liquid democracy (German)
• Liquid class council (German Wikiversity)
• http://opengovernment.org/
• http://www.whitehouse.gov/Open

Community Discussion

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