If anyone has been involved with wikipedia articles from econ issues to the various political ideology ones you most likely hit the anti-Austrian School types when editing or on the talk page. Normal responses are to exclude the Austrian School POV or the authors associated with it with the following reasons:
Austrian School is fringe or non-mainstream and therefor under wikipedia rules should be removed or minimized
That the “source” is not consider authoritative - this might be the author, the mises.org website, the book or article isn’t peer-reviewed, and so forth.
What this amounts to is any attempt of inclusion of Austrian School theory or authors, generally speaking, will be eventually removed under the fringe theories [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/ ]. The majority of editors simply do not accept any classical liberalism, libertarian, or anarcho-capitalist views and will in time scrub any material that asserts it. Which leaves the general public that use wikipedia as a reference with very little chance of seeing there is an alternative way of looking at the world, governance, and liberty.
I would think that a wikpedia that was a collaboration between like-minded organization [to a degree] could be useful and exciting. Like fee.org, cato.org , mises.org and so forth.
The objective of the project would be:
To allow a topic to be discussed fully and freely under the Austrian School view point and those that the general public would associate with it.
To act as a reference for others to see the best “sources” for the topic and the positions taken. This would “arm” those attempting to engage on a topic at wikipedia.org and similar sites the resources needed to argue for inclusion. [material at http://www.libertarianpapers.org/ for example]
To expose the failure or lack of sources to uphold positions that require or have certain standards; peer-reviewed material for example.
To also start making the distinction between sources and authors that would not be consider “fringe” under the wikipedia rules.
Having an “encyclopedia” would also allow everyone to know all the nuggets in the existing free materials that are on mises.org , fee.org, cato.org and so forth. As people discover all those great references for topical item in the full length books, they’ll have a place to put the quote and so forth. An example issue, how would one go about now determine the various opinions on “fascism” using the material at mises.org? Is it left, right, center, or neither left or right? Is it to be consider socialism, right-wing socialism? The how and why’s of it being different from classical liberalism?
I have many more ideas on this subject and reasons for a need for it, but I’ll hold off until I see if anyone else is interested.
References:
Note - I mean a more “traditional” type of wiki than what we see with:
If the Mises Institute really does believe in open-source and new media, then what it should do is take all of its books and literature and make it into a wiki. So that means that we could edit Rothbard’s MES or America’s Great Depression in light of new facts, or re-construct them into new articles entirely.
Have you thought about asking the various sites that might be interest in linking to your wiki? Like mises.org and fee.org ? I’m not sure if either of their sites are interesting in doing a “wiki” or linking to one. Mises.org does have a large number of visitors that might be required to really get a project like this reaching a critical mass.
Or, you could download the PDF, free of charge, then copy the text onto Microsoft Word and make the edits there. Then you hit the save button and make your revised copy available to everyone.
You can do this exact thing on my Wiki; there are a number of articles on it by DiLorenzo, Hoppe, etc.
I just made the topics general btw (The Myth of Natural Monopoly → Monopoly); which makes it a little easier to navigate, and better for the Wiki format.
Furthermore, you could download the Wikipedia open source and install it onto your website and make a Wikipedia-like version of what ever it is you want published.
I think it is more of a bias from the people at wikipedia. Their site is topographical trash anyways when it comes to delving into social science theories and events.
wikipedia.org will be around for a long time and will always be useful to everyone. My point is that there’s a meme, group think, that will continue to fight against AS supported and similar authors and positions in favor of Statist approving ones. We need to continue to play the game, but play it smarter than them. A wikipedia type project would allow “us” to get our stuff together prior to submission formally for reference on sites like wikipedia. It’s easier to get one link added to an article [ link on topic sourcing the mises.org wikipedia article that fully explains the position] on wikipedia.org than it is trying to insert multiple sources to explain the position completely.
I third the for need FAQ/Wiki style page, it has been requested a few times in the past. We have a wiki page here but it mechanically does not work very intuitively.