Talk:Inclusive Democracy

This article was nominated for deletion on 15 January 2007. The result of the discussion was withdrawn by nominator.

Temp page

I uploaded a modified version of the Inclusive Democracy entry. This has nothing to do with the original one which was based on the corresponding Routledge entry and caused the copy vio. User: Narap43, 10:40 (UTC), 27 December 2005

---SOMEBODY VANDALIZED THE PAGE JUST BEFORE WITH A PORNIGRAPHIC PICTURE. SHOULDN'T SOMEONE SEARCH WHO DID IT?--TheVel 13:23, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

• Comment We demand that wiki administrators trace the IP so we can find out who vandalized the page with pornography!User:john sargis 8:38, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

• Question for the administrators

It is well known that every entry here (or anywhere in Wikipedia for that matter) leaves its trace in the History page. Why the pornographic entry, which stayed here for over an hour, left no trace at all in the history page? But, even if this vandalising entry somehow did not leave any trace in the History page surely it left its trace in your monitors and therefore you know the IP of the vandaliser. OK?

IS ANY ADMINISTRATOR LISTENING?

I watched the Administrators' behaviour with respect to the Inclusive Democracy (ID) entry and I could only characterise it as a perfect example of authoritarianism mixed with ignorance.

First, you discovered possible copyright violation in the ID entry with respect to the corresponding entry in the Inclusive Democracy.org webpage and the relevant Routledge Encyclopedia entry. Then, the webmaster of the ID webpage wrote to you and explained that there was no such violation as he has the copyrights for all the contents of his webpage. Furthermore, he created a new temp. page on ID which has little relation to the old one and consequently to the one in Routledge. You ignored him. Instead a supposed 'expert' in copyrights violations, under the name karmafist yesterday deleted the temp page WITH NO EXPLANATION AT ALL. When today the webmaster posted the same page, another 'expert' under the name Ulayiti deleted the page again, OFFERING ALSO NO EXPLANATION AT ALL.

Could you stop behaving in such an arbitrary way and explain what is wrong with the temp. page? The fact that it contains parts of the old entry, for anyone with an elementary knowledge of copyrights legislation, is not a violation, particularly if the author of both entries is one and the same: Takis Fotopoulos! Had you checked for instance the entries on Participatory Economics by Michael Albert in his own webpage and elsewhere against the WP entry on Participatory Economics you would have found dozens of cases of similar 'violations'.

Alternatively, if you have no explanation for your arbitrary actions then you have to restore the temp. page as the new ID entry--unless of course, as one may suspect, the reasons for your action have much more to do with the political content of ID which is clearly against the political affiliations of most administrators--particularly those deleting the temp.page-- (rather than with any copyright violations!

The words 'Wikipedia' and 'copyright' are not compatible with each other. In other words, nothing on Wikipedia is copyrighted. If you upload something on Wikipedia, you release it under the GFDL licence, which means that anyone can do pretty much whatever they want with it. If you want to upload content that is currently copyrighted, you must show that you are in fact the copyright holder, and relinquish all rights to the content itself. - ulayiti (talk) 20:25, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

New Version

I have prepared a new version of the Inclusive Democracy entry for use exlusively for Wikipedia purposes. Does this resolve any possible copyright problems?? User:Narap43, 15:30, 29 December (UTC)

I've removed the protection from the article, so you're free to put that version up now. - ulayiti (talk) 14:19, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

The new version also appears to be a copyvio, so I have reverted and reinstated protection. [[Sam Korn]] 16:01, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

The Inclusive Democracy entry was not deleted for vanity reasons as this (rightwinger) Jbamb implies but for a minor copyvio reason, which has by now been corrected and there is a new ID entry. The IJID entry also should not have been deleted and several administrators have now recognised this error as the relevant debate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Democracy_%26_Nature_%282nd_nomination%29 shows. User:john sargis12:27, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

New Authoritarianism

Can you be more specific on why the new version also appears to be a copyvio because alternatively you simply abuse your power? A mMember of the International Network for Inclusive Democracy, 16:35, 31 Dec. 2005

The new version WAS NOT a copyvio. Sam Corn's protection is unacceptable. --TheVel 17:02, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

1. Don't write in bold, it's impolite. 2. It is not unacceptable to remove a page that is a) unsuitable for an encyclopedia and b) (far more importantly) an apparent violation of copyright. A Google search for random pieces of text still throws up results at inclusivedemocracy.com, and, to my knowledge, there has been no formal release of the text under the GFDL, which is mandatory for text on Wikipedia. [[Sam Korn]] 17:36, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

The fact that the new version of ID contains approximately the same sections as the old one is not a proof of copyvio (otherwise most entries on various scientific or theoretical topics would be copyvios!). To prove a copyvio you have to show that the entry as a whole, or at least entire sections of it, are copyvios from another copyright-protected page. In fact our webmaster explicitly stated that this is a version which is different from the one published in Routledge Encyclopedia (the cause of the previous copyvio) and he specifically adopted for the new version the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. User:john sargis 12:51, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Fine. OK. My text is We may distinguish various forms of political power-sharing in History, which, schematically, may be classified as either democratic or oligarchic. In the former, political power is shared equally among all those with full citizen rights (typical example the Athenian ecclesia), whereas in the latter political power is concentrated, in various degrees, at the hands of miscellaneous elites. Now see [1] and [2] To prove a copyvio (from WP's POV) you need some reasonable idea that the text uses a copyrighted source. Until there is some official release from the owners of the copyright, this article remains a copyright violation. If and when that comes, I shall immediately list on AfD as this article is completely unverified and biased. Happy new year. [[Sam Korn]] 18:00, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

The version I uploaded is a summary page of the main aspects of Inclusive Democracy. As such, it is reasonable that some phrases will be a repetition of main phrases from our website. The specific you mention, as well as some other parts of the text, are from the onine book "The Multidimensional Crisis & Inclusive Democracy", for which the rights are reserved by the International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (please refer to [3]). As the webmaster of this Journal, I have released the specific parts used in the Inclusive Democracy entry for Wikipedia purposes. To prove this, I wrote some days ago a relevant e-mail to the Wikimedia foundation from the Journal's address. In conclusion, please indicate a way to proceed with this since a GFDL on the whole book is, as you understand, not an option. User: Narap43, 18:57, 31 December 2005, (UTC)

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF D&N AND IJID

1. We, the members of the Editorial Board of Democracy & Nature (D&N) and its present successor The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (IJID) have, over the last few days, witnessed a concerted attack against the journal by an alliance of sockpuppets (who have been created by a disgruntled ex-member of the journal with a vendetta against us) and some administrators who are either apolitical (not in the sense of party politics but in the sense of a fundamental lack of understanding of politics in the broader sense) or who do not hide their hostility towards the Inclusive Democracy political agenda. This ‘unholy’ alliance has attempted to delete all Inclusive Democracy entries in Wikipedia and in some cases it has already succeeded in doing this.

2. The reasons for which Wikipedia have attempted to substantiate their AfDs range from silly WP copyright violations (from our own webpages!-- which, if applied to all WP entries, would lead to most of them being eclipsed) to arbitrary ‘assessments’ of the notability and significance of our entries. Such ‘assessments’ are given either by administrators who do not have any expertise on the topics they are assessing, or by others following their own political agenda which is at the opposite end of the political spectrum to the Inclusive Democracy project.

3. We find it humiliating, to say the least, to be subjected to this pseudo-democratic process which defames not only our journals, which have been honoured to have had as contributors and members of their Editorial Boards well-known writers such as Steven Best, Murray Bookchin, Pierre Bourdieu, Cornelius Castoriadis, Noam Chomsky, Takis Fotopoulos, Andre Gunder Frank, Serge Latouche, Harold Pinter-- and many other equally important writers who do not have similar WP entries—but also our subscribers who have, in the past, included such notable institutions as Michigan State University, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, London School of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Stanford University, Simon Fraser University, Hamburg Library, University of New South Wales, University of Canterbury, Kent; Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal; Harvard College Library,Iinternational Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; Formazione ii Biblioteca, Palermo; Bath University and many others. Furthermore, we find this process equally humiliating to the authors of hundreds of references and citations to D&N and IJID in books, journals, magazines, and electronic media.

4. Finally, we find appaling the fact that, through Wikipedia’s so-called assessment process, self-anointed administrators, with no guarantee at all of any expertise in the fields they assess, use their wide-ranging powers to decide which pieces of knowledge and information are appropriate enough to be included in Wikipedia. These powers include discounting the votes of registered users who are not long-established--even if their expertise is much more relevant to the topics assessed than that of the administrators, as the irrelevant comments of these administrators frequently show. These built-in fatal errors in assessment—only some of which have been mentioned--could go a long way in explaining the growing literature in the world press on the low standard of knowledge and information provided by Wikipedia.

5. When we created the WP Inclusive Democracy entries, we were functioning as bona fide new users thinking that we were helping the development of a free and supposedly democratic encyclopaedia that could function as an alternative source of information to the established encyclopaedias. We were utterly disappointed when we discovered the irresponsible and completely unreliable way in which knowledge on important matters is supposedly created by this supposedly alternative encyclopaedia, which clearly will never reach the standards of the established encyclopaedias because of the fatal structural flaws mentioned. Therefore, the sooner it is disqualified as an authoritative source of knowledge, the better.

6. In light of the above we have decided the following:

a) to withdraw with immediate effect ALL the Inclusive Democracy entries from Wikipedia, including those that have been challenged only on account of trivial Wikipedia copyright violations, as well as those like the entry on the founder of Inclusive Democracy, Takis Fotopoulos, which has not been challenged by anyone during this whole process. b) to demand the banning of any new entry on the following topics: Inclusive Democracy, Democracy & Nature, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, The International Network for Inclusive Democracy and Takis Fotopoulos. We reserve all our legal rights in case any future entries on these topics are created in Wikipedia without our explicit and written permission.

The Editorial Committee of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy Narap43, 17:28, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

ADDENDUM

Since yesterday’s announcement some of the main points we made in it have already been confirmed! Thanks to the technical work of some administrators who showed that they function without any political agendas against us but instead attempted to find out the truth, Paul Cardan (the disgruntled ex-member of the journal with a vendetta against us who was the main cause of the first AfD against Democracy & Nature through his repeated vandalising attacks against it) and User:DisposableAccount (who proposed the deletion of the successor journal to D&N and with the support of two (2) administrators managed to have it deleted), Llbb and Bbll (who persuaded other administrators to keep the page deleted) are all the same editor! [4]

Meanwhile, other administrators still doubt whether the present announcement is a genuine Editorial Board announcement. Here is the proof:

http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/newsletter/Wikipedia.htm

The Editorial Committee of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy

11:19 (UTC) January 2, 2006 User:Narap43

GFDL, copvio and withdrawing content

Either the disputed content was or was not released under the GFDL. If it was, then it cannot be taken back. If not, then the above announcement is false when it claims the copyvio objection was groundless. Either way, the above announcement lacks credibility. --- Charles Stewart 18:40, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. When they came to Wikipedia they should have understood its rules and accepted them. Unfortunately, they chose a confrontational pattern of behaviour. They should stop for a moment and think if such internet drama befits an academic. SentientContrarian (talk) 15:12, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Considering nomination for deletion.

I am considering nominating this page for deletion under Articles for Deletion in accordance with Wikipedia:Notability:

...a topic is notable if it has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial, reliable published works, whose sources are independent of the subject itself. (emphasis added)

Please bolster the article's case for notability, if possible.

In the alternative, please develop the article with more content. Right now it is obviously just a submarine advertisement for a political philosophy, with only enough text so that it can call itself an article and get the reader to use the external links. I have to warn you that without a solid case for notability, the article will continue to be in danger of deletion. However, as a matter of personal choice, I will not personally initiate the deletion process as long as someone puts some actual content in.

Drake Dun 10:37, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Adding new material.

I added a lot of new material, first, to give more info on the aspects of the Inclusive Democracy project and, second, to establish the notability of the article. Also, many links to online and printed resources are given.

User:narap43 9:13, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

False contrasts to ParEcon

All four references to parecon are misleading:

"This implies a new definition of economic efficiency, based not on narrow techno-economic criteria of input minimisation/output maximization as in socialist models like Parecon, but on criteria securing full coverage of the democratically defined basic needs of all citizens as well as of the non-basic needs they decide to meet -- even if this involves a certain amount of inefficiency according to the orthodox economics criteria."

Parecon is not based on input minimization and product maximization, but on value maximization, that is, satisfying the needs of consumers (citizens). For example, the citizens can decide that a process that uses more inputs and produces fewer products is preferable because it makes the work more enjoyable. About basic needs, see below.

"This is so because economic decision making is carried out by the entire community, through the citizens' assemblies, where people make the fundamental macro-economic decisions which affect the whole community, as citizens, rather than as vocationally oriented groups (e.g. workers, as e.g. in Parecon [8])."

The sentence is flatly false. Parecon's consumer councils play the same role as ID's citizen assemblies. The only reason parecon theory refers to consumers rather than citizens is because it focuses on the economic aspects of social organization. Participatory polity, which is the extension of parecon to politics, focuses on the political aspects.

"The main characteristic of the proposed model, which also differentiates it from socialist planning models like Parecon, is that it explicitly presupposes a stateless, money-less and market-less economy that precludes private accumulation of wealth and the institutionalisation of privileges for some sections of society, without relying on a post-scarcity state of abundance, or sacrificing freedom of choice."

The sentence falsely suggests that parecon is based on a market economy, based on a state, and allows the institutionalization of privileges for some sectors of society, or relies on a post-scarcity state of abundance, or sacrifices freedom of choice any more than ID. Parecon does not do any of these. Whether it allows the accumulation of wealth depends on what that means. The only real difference from parecon is ID's money-less economy.

"Thus, unlike Parecon where basic needs are satisfied thanks to public goods and to compassion,[10] ID is based on the principle that meeting basic needs is a fundamental human right which is guaranteed to anybody who offers a minimal amount of work."

What compassion? Parecon guarantees an average income to those who cannot get income by working -- the unemployed and the infirm. ID guarantees basic goods to everyone who can work a minimally. Both are based on compassion, and that is not a weakness of either. Also, parecon does not assume that everyone's basic needs are the same, so it offers more freedom of choice. Also, it seems that ID in fact assumes abundance of basic goods in order to guarantee them to everyone. That assumption may not hold, for example, in time of war or natural disaster.

-Pgan002 (talk) 20:54, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

A biased defence of Parecon and distortion of Inclusive Democracy

All four defences of Parecon above are biased and false

“Parecon is not based on input minimization and product maximization, but on value maximization, that is, satisfying the needs of consumers (citizens). For example, the citizens can decide that a process that uses more inputs and produces fewer products is preferable because it makes the work more enjoyable. About basic needs, see below”.

The discussant obviously has no idea what the issue is about. The issue is not what is the objective of production (value maximization, etc.), but what definition of efficiency Albert and Hahnel adopt and as Fotopoulos points out in his critique of Parecon (“Inclusive Democracy and Participatory Economics”, DEMOCRACY & NATURE: vol.9, no.3, (November 2003) “in the pursuit of respectability and recognition by the ‘serious’ economists,( i.e. the orthodox economics profession teaching in universities, etc.) the authors adopt unreservedly even what themselves call ‘the traditional view’ that a desirable economy should be ‘efficient’ and they then proceed to adopt the orthodox Paretian optimality conditions ‘as a useful definition of social efficiency’ (M. Albert’s and R. Hahnel’s ‘The Political Economy of Participatory Economics’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 9). Of course, these optimality conditions imply input minimization or output maximization!

“The sentence is flatly false. Parecon's consumer councils play the same role as ID's citizen assemblies. The only reason parecon theory refers to consumers rather than citizens is because it focuses on the economic aspects of social organization. Participatory polity, which is the extension of parecon to politics, focuses on the political aspects.”

This is another typical example of the biased defence of Parecon by the discussant. Fotopoulos says the same thing, but he draws a very different conclusion: “Given the nature of Parecon as purely an economic model, it is not surprising that the main actors in it are determined in the economic field. Thus, the concept of citizen is completely missing from the Parecon model and is replaced instead by workers and consumers”. And further on he explains why the compartmentalization of people into workers and consumers and the identification of consumers with citizens attempted by Parecon is completely irrelevant to democracy: “However, the dual council structure proposed by Parecon, instead of creating an all round personality of citizen as citizen who expresses the general interest, it enhances the market economy’s division of people as consumers and workers, and is inevitably leading to the creation of particular interests, which potentially may come in conflict with each other… In other words, people as workers may have conflicting ideas, views and possibly even interests with people as consumers, and the dualism between workers and consumers councils enhances competition between them.”

“The sentence falsely suggests that parecon is based on a market economy, based on a state, and allows the institutionalization of privileges for some sectors of society, or relies on a post-scarcity state of abundance, or sacrifices freedom of choice any more than ID. Parecon does not do any of these. Whether it allows the accumulation of wealth depends on what that means. The only real difference from parecon is ID's money-less economy.”

This is a pure distortion of the sentence in the ID entry which does not say that Parecon is based on a market economy (Fotopoulos has recognized the non-market nature of Parecon anyway: “Parecon is, of course, in accord with the ID project as far as it concerns the rejection of the market mechanism as incompatible with self-management”). What it does say is that “socialist Planning models like Parecon” have characteristics that are missing from ID, like a state-based economy (Parecon does not explicitly propose a stateless economy, like ID does, but simply demands compatibility of “political institutions” with the economic institutions: “institutions existing alongside a Parecon will have to respect balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and self-management and…will have to interface with participatory planning’ (Parecon, p. 287)). Furthermore, Parecon does not assume, unlike ID, a moneyless economy, (as the discussant admits) and this makes possible the accumulation of wealth in a Parecon system and so on.

“What compassion? Parecon guarantees an average income to those who cannot get income by working -- the unemployed and the infirm. ID guarantees basic goods to everyone who can work a minimally. Both are based on compassion, and that is not a weakness of either. Also, parecon does not assume that everyone's basic needs are the same, so it offers more freedom of choice. Also, it seems that ID in fact assumes abundance of basic goods in order to guarantee them to everyone. That assumption may not hold, for example, in time of war or natural disaster.”

This is either a complete misunderstanding of what ID proposes or a pure distortion of it in order to defend Parecon. ID does not assume that everybody’s needs are the same nor it assumes abundance of basic goods, or compassion! What is a basic need in ID is not determined “objectively”, but by the democratic decisions of citizens who also assess at what level such needs can be met given the scarcity of resources. Then, the way basic and non-basic needs are met is decided individually by each citizen through the use of vouchers or special credit cards - a way securing real freedom of choice, in contrast to the bureaucratic way in which consumer needs are met in Parecon. As for compassion, this is a bourgeois principle adopted by Parecon, whereas ID bases the meeting of basic needs on the communist principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his/her needs”.

John sargis (talk) 22:05, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Bad categorization

I eliminated redundances and original investigations in cats (cats work like that: A contents B). But some users don't want to understand it. Please see: WP:POINT. --Nihilo 01 (talk) 16:15, 4 March 2009 (UTC)