After reading Fast Company's article on Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, I ventured into his new venture, Wikia, and wrote this critique of its Wikia Politics magazine.
Why is Wikia Politics organized around big-P Parties?
Why do I see a menu on Wikia Politics with a list of big-P Parties? Monolithic one-stop-shopping Parties are so last century. Instead parties in the future will come in bits and pieces.... (more)
Wales is a hero. Here he discusses the inner workings of Wikipedia at a TED Global Conference in 2005. Among the many interesting topics he touches on, Wales discusses how Wikipedia successfully serves as a meeting place of ideas thanks to its overarching "neutral point of view" policy.
I fully expect Wikia to out-compete Google Web Search.
I'm excited to find a structure there for an open-source constitution, an idea I have had in mind for many years. I submitted an entry to a competition The Economist magazine held in the early '90s for a European constitution. Later in the '90s when the open-content license appeared, it seemed a natural for such an effort, particularly if it were to be a Hayekian one. I also envision that this effort be component-based. In the late '90s, after learning Java and the idea of polymorphism, component-based-law struck me as a way out of the spaghetti legal code our world is plagued with. Indeed I believe Europe rejected its proposed constitution (thankfully!) because it contained was bureaucratic spaghetti.
Version 1.1 (Apr 24, 2007)
Update: Here's another illuminating video of Jimmy Wales.
Update (Nov 19 , 2007): Sadly Wikia Politics has ended up quite moribund.
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