Civipedia
The idea behind this proposal is to build a wiki-based Citizens' Information portal for every state in the world. The purpose of a Citizens' Information portal is to provide essential and neutral information that is of use to citizens. This information can be a directory of services offered by local authorities, with links and telephone numbers, or it can be short (and factual) background information on matters like noise regulations or tenants’ rights and obligations.
An example of a currently existing Citizens' Information portal is www.citizensinformation.ie, a website run by the Irish government.
This proposal is to begin small. Initially, the wiki could begin with factual information on politicians, government department and local authorities. For example:
- Details on members of parliament (e.g. email address, postal addresses, statistical information, etc.)
- Background information on political parties (e.g. contact information, links to policy documents, statistical information on election results, etc.)
- Lists of local authorities, details of local councillors and information on local authority departments
As it grew, it could include richer information, such as:
- How the political system works
- Consumer rights
- Citizenship rights and obligations
However, it would be important to strike a balance between providing citizen information and duplicating the work of projects such as Wikipedia. Relevent articles on Wikipedia or Wiktionary could be linked to for greater discussion.
An aspect of the project that would determine its success or failure would be whether entries could be kept to-the-point, factual and neutral. The purpose of the wiki would be to provide information, not to comment on it. A well-defined set of policies and guidelines, developed in the early stages of the project (though necessarily evolving with it), would be essential. The project could be trialled in an initially small set of countries to determine these policies and guidelines before opening the project to an ever-increasing number of places.
Contents |
[edit] Proposed by
- RA (talk)
[edit] Alternative names
- Civilpedia
[Open to suggestions]
[edit] Related projects/proposals
[edit] Domain names
- civipedia.org - A landing page like wikipedia.org
Because of its nature, the wiki would need to have specific instances for each state. These could be differentiated using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as subdomains, e.g.:
- ie.civipedia.org - Ireland
- gb.civipedia.org - United Kingdom
For federal states, these could be differentiated using two tiers of subdomains, e.g.:
- us.civipedia.org - USA
- ca.us.civipedia.org - California
- ny.us.civipedia.org - New York
[edit] Mailing list links
[edit] Demos
- ie.civipedia.org — a "Civipedia Ireland", in the very early stages, to test the idea
