A wiki is great for collaboration, while articles can be neatly polished and put up for presentation, no arguing against that. But there is another component to the Wiki-magic you have to consider: the linking. In many arguments about any concept, the terms of the argument soon come under discussion (or the argument veers off on some vaguely-related tangent). In a richly-linked wiki, you can always click on a keyword and learn a lot about it - that’s a part of what gives Wikipedia its monumental encyclopedic nature (well that and the sheer size, and the quality of the resources).
And that’s something I would like to see in the end - an actual Austrian encyclopedia, where you could follow pretty much any concept to its key parts, and if interested, found valuable links to more knowledge. There is a huge amount of articles and books in Mises.org alone, not to speak of other sources it would be great to have a resource that would index them, and point any interested student (or opponent) to anything of interest in the Austrian School.
And yeah, arguments for and against X should be an important part of that, too.
One thing that a good wiki - or the base of one - can be recognized by, is the possibility to add things quickly and with ease. (This is of course more complicated for our topic, but still.) We all are studying the Austrian school from one source or another. If we had a good base to build things on, we could just insert the key snippets into the wiki as we go on. There’s a daily article about Menger, but you don’t really have time or mood to process it? Link to it on Menger’s page, maybe someone interested will take care of it later. There’s an esoteric piece about a little-known feature of fractional reserve banking? Filter out the most important points and put it on the FRB page, referencing the source.
Thing is, researching for an encyclopedia is incredibly time consuming and downright maddening. But if you do it as a part of your education (which sometimes goes further than expected…), you can build it up as you go, with the additional advantage that you are forced to clarify what you learn, and write it down for others. And you can contribute even with little time.
All that is needed is such a base, and a few people willing to write something down on occasion.
Well, if we are going to use the aforementioned wiki (which we still haven’t agreed on… hint, hint, nudge, nudge), anyone can edit it, a login is not required but preferred. Other setups may need different arrangements.
I wish it could be hosted at the mises site to ensure that it gets used and for easy referencing on the forums. I feel that more folks would use it if it were hosted here. The problem is the software platform which runs the mises site, while is great for holding all our literature, has a terrible built in wiki.
Someone else has stated they’d be willing to host the Wiki site using mediawiki as the software and would allow it to be open and interchangeable from place to place. The problem than becomes decentralization. Web users may end up going from one end of the internet to the other to explore all the topics. Itd be nice if we had a centralized FAQ which covered most of the commonly asked questions here.
But Mises.org is not the only place where these questions are asked. They are asked all over the web and in real life.
Look at the People and Works lists on my site. These people are all not affiliated with the Mises Institute:
Anthony de Jasay
David Friedman
Mary Ruwart
George Smith
Randy Barnett
Stefan Molyneux
Marc Stevens
Bryan Caplan
Peter Leeson
Carl Watner
J. Wilson Mixon, Jr.
Wendy McElroy
David Beito
Wes Bertrand (not on the list yet)
I think I like the idea of a wiki more now actually. MediaWiki is way too powerful and heavy for this application btw. A good candidate would be WikkaWiki. Demopage here. Looks better than Wikipedia.
(Is there a converter for Mediawiki content into this wiki?)
Update: more importantly, how can one create references in this wiki? Searched for a while, didn’t find any mention of it. I am all for pretty design but this could be a hurdle…
I meant: I have the footnotes working in the test-environment. I also have the table of contents working now btw. I’m a little sad that isn’t fully automated and only half-automated. But that appears the only downside at this moment.
I’m still working on one little issue with headers.
I don’t quite want to make it public now because I want to make sure nobody will have to redo anything they create because of some change in the code.
(What is not automated resp. half-automated? If you find downsides of the engine, that would be of course of interest here.
On the side, what was the issue with MediaWiki? It may not be a beauty, but that can be solved with a suitable skin or a little tweaking. Also, once you have something formatted for it, you can copy material 1:1 to Wikipedia. Think for the future. )
I can create a one-click backup of the SQL database, so there is no worry of losing a lot of data. And it’s a Wiki with all the usual revert options, so I think we’re good.
