User:Joesydney/Wikipedia will save the planet

If you accept that Wikipedia is alive, then it follows fairly closely that Wikipedia is sentient and quite stunningly intelligent. This essay makes the further argument that Wikipedia will save the planet - Or at least that it is in a better position to do so than national governments or individuals.

James Lovelock, Gaia and Spaceship Earth
Stuff here.

The Free rider problem or Tragedy of the Commons and the problem we face in Climate Change
More stuff. But maybe some caution here. The great joy of writing in a wiki is that you don't have to rabbit on for twenty pages. A hyperlink is worth a thousand words.

Wikipedia as the way out
Ideally, bits of the above will read humorously, intriguingly - there should be a bit of suspense to pull the reader on: "Is this guy serious?" In this last section it should emerge that the essay is deadly serious. We are deeply screwed unless we stumble on to a radically different way of governing decisions. But bottom-up, democratic, open-source looks very promising. Lots of places where it is outperforming centralised systems by an order of magnitude.

One organism, so no free-rider problem. Ridiculously clever - so it has a hope of analysing and solving the environmental problems. Wikipedia (or one of its forks) - the only way out.

The essay would be completely vulnerable to the charge of original research, rather than encyclopedic reportage - so I can only get away with it as an essay. Even then I'll need to do some research into the functions that Wikipedia essays are supposed to fill. What distinguishes an essay from a rant. Not much!