Talk:Annotated Speeches

Andy at DotEarth has been messing with this. Although some of it is used for more clearly understanding the facts of the policy proposed, for the most part his implementation is a vehicle for commentary. And commentary in Policypedia belongs on talk pages, not in the articles. Anyway, Andy's DotEarth annotation is using it as a foil for commentary. His commentary is more equal than the commentary from the peanut gallery.

On the downside, I can see this as an ego thing where loud individuals seek to put themselves on an equal standing with political leaders. Everyone becomes a critic. That's not a productive environment for discourse.

If that is how this turns out then it won't be that useful for doing democracy the wiki way.

What I find appealing about it is that if the speech is annotated with facts, then the speech becomes a jumping off point to go deeper into the political figure's policy positions. Maybe this can be done in an NPOV manner.

Structure: For shallowly annotated speeches, the annotations could be in ref tags. Deeper annotations would have callouts to more lengthy treatments on subpages. I will experiment with this on the Al Gore "apollo alternative fuels" speech.

-Jmesserly 18:01, 19 July 2008 (UTC)