Bei meinen diversen Aktivitäten vor allem in der Umweltbewegung war ich des öfteren damit konfronitiert, mich mit allerlei seltsamen Strömungen aus esoterischen Kreisen, Sekten und ähnlichem kritisch zu befassen. Schon in der Vergangenheit verspürte ich ab und an den Wunsch, eine Art zentralisierte Informationssammlung, möglichst in Wiki-Form, zu derartigem zu erstellen.

Kürzlich wurde ich durch telepolis darauf aufmerksam, dass es ein Projekt, welches relativ genau dem entspricht, was ich mir da vorstellte, bereits gibt: EsoWatch, das Wiki der irrationalen Überzeugungssysteme

Dort schreibe ich nun auch mit. Gefreut hat mich bereits, dass vor einigen Tagen beschlossen wurde, eine freie Lizenz (FDL) zu verwenden (vorher gab es keine Lizenzinformationen). Im Moment stört mich noch, dass an einigen Stellen eher Polemik statt Fakten zu finden ist, langfristig würde ich eine Annäherung an den NPOV (Neutraler Standpunkt) der Wikipedia für wünschenswert halten (wobei »Neutralität« natürlich für sich ein nicht unkritisches Konzept ist, selbige kann es qua Definition nicht geben).

Still here at the 23C3, I'll try to summarize some things about the talks I've visited yesterday.

First was a presentation about the Trust model of GPG/PGP and an alternative approach. I wasn't so impressed, because I think the main lack from the web-of-trust-infrastructure is that it's too complex to understand for the masses.

The Lightning-Talks were quite nice, some guy presented some live-hacks to a poorly designed travel agency, which was very funny. I personally presented compiz and told some short things about the situation of 3D-graphics and desktops.
I saw about the last 10 minutes of a talk about Drones, camera-supplied small devices flying around, and thoughts what these devices could mean for the society. A group is working on creating such devices on quite small costs. I'll have to fully view that on video after the congress.

Another very interesting Talk: »The gift of sharing«, the referent presented thoughts what kind of »economy-structure« the free software development should be called. It was a bit difficult to follow the talk, as it was in english and I'm no native english speaker. There's a paper from the guy which is probably worth reading.

The last talk was about wiki knowledge and citing that in science. The referents plan to create an RFC for citing-URLs in Wikis.
What irritated me was a computer science professor telling that she wouldn't allow her students to cite wikis, with the stupid argument they should cite their sources from books, completely igonring that science can happen in wikis and it may be the original source of the knowledge, not just something that has been explored elsewhere. Ruediger Weiss gave good arguments against that and mentioned that he thinks wiki is really a new kind of doing science and should be handled as such.

To be continued.