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So, I think that such a project works well with the concept of NPOV. I think
you can break the site into two distinct parts.

Part 1: You collect opinions of various sorts in various ways.
Part 2: You organize them in terms of their relative significance to each
other and summarize them in a disinterested voice.

This would be a lot like Wikibooks and Wikipedia; people write stuff on
Wikibooks and then people cite those books on Wikipedia.

-Josh

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sage Ross wrote:
> > I think this is an excellent, long overdue idea and something
> > Wikimedia should be interested in. I was actually thinking of
> > proposing something like this at strategy.wikimedia.org (and may still
> > do so).
> >
>
> I don't think that creating such a project within Wikimedia would be a
> great idea. NPOV is one of the most important Wikimedia principles.
>
> --vvv
>
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Victor Vasiliev wrote:
> Sage Ross wrote:
>
>> I think this is an excellent, long overdue idea and something
>> Wikimedia should be interested in. I was actually thinking of
>> proposing something like this at strategy.wikimedia.org (and may still
>> do so).
>>
>>
>
> I don't think that creating such a project within Wikimedia would be a
> great idea. NPOV is one of the most important Wikimedia principles.
>

No it is *not*. I will continue to combat this pernicious
canard as long as there is breath in my body.

NPOV is a band-aid that enables the writing of a collaboratively
edited encyclopaedia about subjects which while they may be
fixed as to their true nature, are inherently subjectively understood
by various people.

NPOV is *not* a transcendent principle. It shouldn't be raised
to the level of something immutable and sacred. It is just a tool.

Wikinews does not adhere to the strict NPOV interpretation that is
inevitable for Wikipedia. Wikiversity could not even come close
to employing anything remotely like it. Wikispecies actually
doesn't have any need for anything like it. And for Wikisource,
just as for Wikinews, NPOV can only be considered to apply in
a thoroughly transmogrified form.

Thank you.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen



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Sage Ross wrote:
> Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's
> reviews. Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an
> extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon),
> and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit
> company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access
> or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the
> good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good.
>

I buy this, but my main question would be: why Wikimedia? It doesn't
seem to have a lot to do with collaborative editing, wikis, knowledge
production, or any of our other core areas. My guess for what the
software would look like makes it not seem to overlap very much with any
of our existing software, either.

I'd certainly contribute reviews to a review site with a pledge of
openness: some sort of non-content-specific filtering policy (allow spam
to be filtered, but not negative reviews), availability of the metadata,
etc. But people other than Wikimedia are allowed to set up worthwhile
open-content projects. ;-) One corner of the open-review landscape even
exists already: MusicBrainz (www.musicbrainz.org) recently added
user-contributed reviews for music albums.

-Mark


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On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 5:10 AM, Delirium<delirium@hackish.org> wrote:
> Sage Ross wrote:
>> Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's
>> reviews.
> I buy this, but my main question would be: why Wikimedia? It doesn't
> seem to have a lot to do with collaborative editing, wikis, knowledge
> production, or any of our other core areas. My guess for what the
> software would look like makes it not seem to overlap very much with any
> of our existing software, either.
>

I agree, it's something of a departure in being not directly
collaborative and not well-suited for the standard wiki approach. I
think it does have to do with knowledge production--it collects
first-hand knowledge of how well goods function and what their
shortcomings are, for example.

The reason I think Wikimedia might ought to get involved in this area
is because--in terms of public recognition and infrastructural
stability--Wikimedia is becoming a cornerstone of the free culture
ecosystem. So it makes sense to me to start
supporting/mirroring/organizing/structuring useful free content that's
being created within smaller, possibly financially unsustainable
projects, and to make it possible for such projects to continue even
if their original venues shut down.

-Sage

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On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <
cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wikinews does not adhere to the strict NPOV interpretation that is
> inevitable for Wikipedia. Wikiversity could not even come close
> to employing anything remotely like it. Wikispecies actually
> doesn't have any need for anything like it. And for Wikisource,
> just as for Wikinews, NPOV can only be considered to apply in
> a thoroughly transmogrified form.


Knowing very little about Wikiversity and Wikispecies, I'd be interested in
how that can work. I mean, for the general public to collaborate on a wiki,
you have to have some form of rule about objectivity, don't you?

I understand that NPOV has a meaning within the English Wikipedia which
doesn't apply in most of the other projects, but there is an essence of it
that applies to all the projects, isn't there?

Maybe I'm wrong. I'm really interested in your answer if I am.
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