User:Nathan Larson/Should there be a wiki component to LPVA.com?
I am considering interviewing a libertarian and submitting an excerpt of the interview to Virginia Liberty. The article could then provide the URL of a website with the full text of the interview. If that person were to continue responding to questions, that interview text could be expanded.
It seems to me that in situations such as this, LPVA might prefer that the link go to a libertarian website where the content would be hosted relatively permanently and subjected to at least the minimal quality control of libertarian community site owners, rather than to a personal blog, especially one (such as my personal bliki, nathania.org) that might also contain content irrelevant to libertarianism. At the same time, it might be desirable to allow the submitter to make updates to the content as more information becomes available. The previous versions should remain on record, though, for historical purposes.
One possible venue for doing this would be a wiki.lpva.com, much as mises.org has a wiki.mises.org. The ribbon at the top of each page lists the various parts of mises.org, viz. Daily, About, Blog, Literature, Audio/video, Events, Donate, Store, Academy, and Wiki.
Other purposes
What other purposes might such a wiki serve? We might borrow some ideas from Libertarian Wiki's page "How You Can Use Libertarian Wiki":
- Candidates running for office could post status updates at the wiki. (Why wouldn't we use Facebook for this? See Essay:Facebook's advantages and disadvantages)
- Post libertarian propaganda for others to use.
- Post public-domain libertarianish images for people's web-sites in the ImageCommune
- Have every one of your local party's officers write down their job descriptions.
- Edit your newsletter on line. Share the job of correcting typos, fixing grammar, checking content.
- Maintain a calendar or list of events.
- Keep the history of your region.
- Keep track of your candidates' progress in signature collecting.
- Maintain a simple web site for a candidate.
- Enter a "What we have learned" article after completing a task or event.
- Keep track of vendors, products, prices and your level of satisfaction.
Reasons not to establish a wiki.lpva.com
Of course, it must be remembered that Libertarian Wiki and its successor, Libertapedia, mostly failed due to lack of participation. The libertarian community has never demonstrated the ability and willingness to support a very active libertarian wiki. There is a possibility that a wiki.lpva.com would merely be the latest addition to an already large junk heap of mostly empty or inactive libertarian wikis. Arguably, an inactive wiki is worse than no wiki at all, when your intent is to maintain a site whose every component looks vibrant.
To the extent that we do need a libertarian wiki, there are already such wikis out there, including Mises Wiki, that can host the content we want to host. E.g., the full text of the interview I'm considering doing could be posted to the miscellany section of Mises Wiki. There might not be a need to further fragment the wikisphere by creating another wiki with content, goals and efforts that overlap with and possibly duplicate those of other existing wikis.
