There is more to wikis than good layout
I hope you are not serious about this. I like the content and layout of Wikipedia but there is a very basic reason why I cannot use MediaWiki and went with Tikiwiki instead.
The main reason is accountability through authorship. As I stated in my post in another Tikiwiki forum, as good as the contents of Wikipedia, they will not be considered as serious source of information unless people know who wrote those stuff. How much trust, for example, would you give to a heallth information article in Wikipedia, if you do not know who wrote it?
The other key issue for me is more a philosophical point of view. I agree with some other developers of wikis that there is no single "true perspective" — something that Wikipedia is trying to develop through consensus — supposedly from alertness of others who are going to correct what is perceived to be incorrect.
I do not wish to make this a political debate, but let me use a very controversial issue to illustrate this point. Take the struggle for statehood by the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the resulting worldwide implications as a consequence of the historical conflicts between these two peoples. To an extent, many of the problems that have affected many of us worldwide — high oil energy prices, Sept 11 2001, bombings, etc. are linked to a certain degree to the differences in perspective between the Israelis and Palestinians and their inability not to get along as peoples — who in total constitute less than 1% percent of the entire world population. The muddled meddling of the Western world to this conflict just exacerbated the issue further; to the extent that eventually we all suffered and still continue to deal with the ramifications.
Going back to my point, it is not really a case of who is right or wrong between these two peoples — the Israelis and the Palestinians — because the reference point in the arguments are never the same. In fact, based from my own readings and recent events there, the perspectives of people in Israel and in the Palestinian homelands are not as rigig as many of us in the Western world take. There is really no right and wrong, nor truth and falsehood when it comes to the struggles for statehood between the Israelis and Palestinians — it is more a matter of perspective.
To bring this back to Wikipedia, the "resulting truth" that is achieved in the format of the "mediawiki" way is dependent on the people who participate, or should we say most persistent. As a result, it is most likely a Western perspective, quite different from the world view sometimes.
Many now, even within the higher echelons of wikipedia, find the limits of their way at achieving what is "true or accurate" information to be flawed. Others have decided, that there is no single correct perspective.
In a sense, this is what Tikiwiki and other divergence from the original Wikipedia are trying to do — allow the presentation of differences in perspectives but avoiding anarchic and anonymous presentation of information, thereby fostering accountability. In Tikiwiki, this is achieved through the checks and balances that is possible with its elaborate permissions systems. It is not foolproof though because whether we like it or not, whoever is the Administrator of the Tikiwiki page will always have the upper edge in shaping that perspective.
cgc0202
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