Integrally Gay

I have written an article for my blog at Integal Life that has been reposted on Ken Wilber's blog on areas that Wikipedia could benefit from improvement, and put out a call for volunteers to spend time contributing to the project.

A Look at the State of Integral on Wikipedia

Recently I took a look at the state of articles on Wikipedia with an eye towards determining how volunteer editors with knowledge of Integral Theory can chip in to make a difference. For an integral philosophy enthusiast who is willing to take the time to learn a bit about and strictly work within Wikipedia's culture and adhere to its requirements (neutral POV, verifiable sources, decisions by consensus, etc.), there's plenty of opportunity to help ensure the dissemination of accurate and unbiased information about integral philosophy through wikis.

Why is it important what Wikipedia says about Integral?

Consider just two reasons. First: Because Wikipedia pages are very trusted by Google and other search engines, the resulting page is usually right at the top of a search. The wiki's impact is magnified many times because the content is open source and reproduced on hundreds of other websites all over the world. It has been widely observed that large numbers of Internet users seeking information about an individual or organization will go directly to the wiki entry rather than the official website because they believe the information is more likely to be unbiased. It is well known that journalists and bloggers use wiki when researching their articles and posts.

Second: Research that shows that students (from high school to college and even graduate school) often turn to this resource as a first step in research on virtually any topic, even if they know that it cannot usually be cited as a credible source in their papers, because it can point them to credible sources that they can cite for their research. In terms of I-I's current goal of establishing integral studies as more widely accepted in academia, it's hard to think of a better investment of time and energy at this juncture.

Read the whole thing...

It's always a bit of a thrill to have something I've written selected by Ken as a guest post on his blog, and I hope that some good things come of the call for volunteers.