Talk:ThinkTank
From dKosopedia
-Pyrrho 18:14, 23 Jun 2004 (PDT) Ikswazi, I would like to see some instructions on the ThinkTank page... I see clarifying them, but why remove them entirely? I am moving back the requirement that the page state a methodology for now, though it's of course open to debate what we put there....
I am sorry to contradict your editing... but I'm not sure we're clear on the purpose of this page. Why do you think it's a stub? I think it's an index to dkos projects which can be called "ThinkTanks". The dKosopedia is not just an encyclopedia or even primarilly intended to be an encyclopedia. While -most- of the content will be encyclopedic, although written from a progressive point of view, many of us want to create even more strongly put opinions, political strategies, and analysis.
This analysis is not "neutral point of view" and in fact not even nec. points of view we dkosopedia contributers will all agree with. The ThinkTank idea and the other project indexes are here to allow particular methodologies and editorial processes for subsets of pages. The ThinkTank is the most light weight (top) of this sort of page. The editorial process for this page is a single requirement, so far: that pages linked here must represent "projects" which state their methodology/editorial policies.
what do you think?
--also: why remove the sentence htat indicates the order of the ThinkTanks... the point is for people to add their ideas for such project here. I'd like to discuss the order... it can be alphebetical, in the order created, in terms of traffic, whatever, but again, it seems like stating the order in the page is the way to set the standard. This page and these articles are dynamic... it's not imagined they are ever finished encyclopedic essays on a topic, they are projects which are living documents.
Well, that ought to be enough to chew on. Hope that was clear. cheers.
Contents |
Instructions
Put your think tank on the article in the form of a link. Its visible form on the page should give the name of the think tank; the target of the link should be an article describing the methodology of the think tank.
List in the article is in order of creation .
[Moved from the article by Iks(TkPg) 17:59, 23 Jun 2004 (PDT)]
ThinkTank Purpose
Pyrrho 03:51, 27 May 2004 (PDT)the current concept of a thinktank used here is very liberal... just have some sort of method for constructing your articles that describes how you produce articles and of course with general wiki community freedom policing (or not) any of it. As far as can be told "Total random positions with no systmem of delineation" is "acceptable". But the idea is to have a methodology or at least a description of the kind of article envisioned by the given think tank.
This is a programming trick of indirection, the pages listed here point to an unlimited set of articles created by alternate sets of rules. This means we don't have to have a single "dkosopedia" methodology for creating position papers, action ideas, or other types of "think tank" produce, we can have as many as we want. Each ThinkTank can attempt to achieve stability like each article of a wiki itself does.
Another practical justification for the think tank idea itself is that it exists to track ideas in the culture, and create ideas to enter into the culture. The very nature of the domain argues that collaborative techniques would work better for this... each think tank is a theory or approach for creating ideas that are in some sense or another affective in either near or long terms. Each think tank is a strategy for making positions.
A proposal
Proposal:
Stevelu 10:51, 07 Jun 2004 (PDT) Explore developing one or more explicit editorial policies separately from main dkosopedia, with more an openness to personal stories and frank exploration. Example: thinktank areas that are in significant part about the collisions/connections between the personal and the political, and what the bridge between them looks like.
I would argue that the Vision for America thinktank section could use such a space. For me at least, part of building the vision is figuring out how this long term struggle fits into the committments and complexities of the rest of daily life (& personally speaking this takes on some urgency, as kid #2 arrives in August! 8^) That dovetails with the larger issue of how to engage those who are not yet overtly political/activist. (By offering them tangible benefits of community resource-sharing, perhaps, beyond politics per se.) (Some other thoughts are now up at Purpose of the Vision for America page)
One approach might be simply to add a free-form 'meta' to all the components of such sections. I certainly advocate that somewhere we distill a relatively linear and readily accessible representation of the fruits of all our labors.
- --Pyrrho 22:20, 9 Jun 2004 (PDT) personally I like it, but maybe I'm missing something or can clarify something. This is the whole idea of the ThinkTank page... supporting multiple editorial policies. Basically, one way of stating what the "ThinkTank" is, is that it's a custom editorial policy (though it can include more than that... that is, a whole methodology). Are you thinking something else, and if not, then perhaps we should clarify the purpose of the think tanks to explain that it's precisely to allow different approaches, specifically to allow very strong opinions from very particular (although collaborative) points of view.
On Commentary
Joshyelon 11:02, 7 Jun 2004 (PDT) For now, I'm simply adding "Commentary" sections to the bottom of existing articles: example Liberals always blame America first. I was thinking that if any particular article got "big" in the sense that it had more than one commentary, we could split out the commentaries and turn them into separate articles.
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