Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/The International Network for Inclusive Democracy

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 appalling 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 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 18:00, 1 January 2006