TCCWiki and you - new drug information wiki

[Shadowstar]

Greetings,

For the last few years I have been heavily involved in the internet drug community, including moderating TCC, the drug subforum at forums.somethingawful.com for the past two years.

I, along with many members of the forum I moderate, have founded a wiki for all drug-related information. I believe that those of you here (especially in this subforum) might be very interested in joining our community. Here are the main points:

* website: http://tccwiki.com
* Content to include all things drug and mind related: Including encyclopedic articles on shamanism, culture, neuroscienece, anthropology etc.
* More than wikipedia because: On top of the wikipedia-like encyclopedic articles (indeed, users have copied several entire articles from Wikipedia under the auspices of the GFDL) we offer space for "subjective" drug articles (i.e. opinions, guides, tips, tricks, advice), experience reports, and technical guides - as well as our own community portal and a drug-related current events page.
* Goals: To become a central community for the entire internet drug-researching population. I am currently working on getting the word out to the Erowid team, Shroomery, Lycaeum, etc. We are working hard to help this project grow in hopes that it might literally become the "wikipedia of drugs" and more.
* Current state: Over 240 articles and a well-forumulated organizational structure but still really in the early phase of forming a comprehensive database. We need the help of people like you to develop this into a community of excellence.

The project is entirely run by the community. I have done a lot of work setting up the basic organizational structure and some preliminary rules but anybody who signs up is able to change essentially anything. Administrators are able to change literally everything that doesn't require root access. I suspect that many of you dedicated to advanced drug topics would make excellent contributors and administrators on the site.

Thanks for your time. I have consulted Bluelight many times and think you people are doing a wonderful thing. If I didn't have my own drug discussion forum to moderate I think I'd be around here a lot more.

I hope you will take the small amount of time necessary to explore what TCCWiki already has to offer and see if you think this might be something you could get involved with. I believe the possibilities of the wiki format and the community that it might attract could lead to some astounding things.

I'm happy to respond to questions and concerns in this thread. I know some people have reservations about the wiki format; nonetheless this project has great potential. We have systems in place for vandalism already and I firmly believe that if enough people jump on board we will be able to handle absolutely any hiccups along the way.

As a final note, here is a glowing endorsement from Shroomery user Ravus that pretty much sums up my ideas:

This is an excellent idea.

Erowid seems overwhelmed at times due to its limited faculty and presumably immense amount of data, such as thousands of trip reports.

The Shroomery is too informal, and sometimes has incorrect information.

Wikipedia usually works, but often is too objective, when drug informatoin needs to include the subjective experience.

If we can combine the strong points of all three, then a Wiki for all drugs may work out well.

Namaste,
Matthew Cohen

 

[BilZ0r]

Too objective? Oh no.

Seems like an excuse to spread information out even more thinly than it is allready. Erowid has a brilliant search facility for trip reports, and efforts should be made to centralize information there.

Furthermore, erowid is working on a Wiki as far as I am awear. Finally full-size, informative posts with references are more than welcome on both erowid and wikipedia...

So what does your site offer that wikipedia or erowid can't?

 

[Shadowstar]

The "too objective" thing is not something I agree with. I just generally liked what he wrote in that reply and didn't want to censor it.

The idea is to offer a combination (culmination?) of what Erowid and Wikipedia offer, specifically a user-edited version of what Erowid does using Erowid as a static reference with its incredible library of articles. The idea is not to catalog static information like Erowid does, but rather to create a dynamic, comprehensive, one-stop resource where one can easily access the collective consciouness of all online drug researchers - including encyclopedic articles with links to archived references a la Erowid. A complete Wikipedia-style undertaking for drug forums, as it were.

The uniqueness is that trip reports, subjective articles, guides (as well as the same type of encyclopedic articles that Wikipedia offers) can be databased in one spot with incredibly easy user-editing and updating of information. The major appeal I see is that things like experience reports can be submitted instantly, hassle-free, and without fear of hidden censorship or editing (all edits on the wiki are databased). The same goes for guides, advice, information in new fields, and common-knowledge type information that does not belong on Wikipedia and is often hard to find or notably absent from Erowid - after all, this is why we have drug discussion forums. In other words, we could combine in one place the encyclopedic, well-researched knowledge with the (carefully marked and notated) kinds of new or unofficial information that crops up on forums, including information in largely non-western fields such as spiritual experience, shamanism, and contemplative practice. Erowid cannot catalog everything, nor can it keep up with every new development. The wiki could even be a breeding ground, much like this site and others, for research and discussion into new areas of information and knowledge. Wikis don't allow discussion to the same extent or ease as a forum, for sure, but they do provide a tracable evolution of information, including sources used, that otherwise tends to get lost on forums resulting in repeat threads, or entirely lost trains of thought.

The original idea sprang out of the need to have a comprehensive archive for the fruits of our own forum discussions, but it quickly became clear that this can be so much more than that. Think of it as a forum like community dedicated to a Wikipedia/Erowid type database of all drug related knowledge.

As far as searching the mediawiki engine has excellent functioning including redirects for mispellings and disambiguation pages for vague searchings. Moreover, all wiki articles are heavily interlinked putting all relevant information literally one click away, and thereby incredibly increasing the ease of browsing.

I was unaware that Erowid was creating a wiki, I have yet to consult with them directly about this project, although that is in my plans for the near future.

Just to repeat, since you seem to have this misconception, this is by no means a project meant to somehow replace any existing mode of information sharing, but rather to suppliment - with all the advantages of an open wiki format - forums, chat, Lycaeum, and Erowid etc. (i.e. the internet drug world). I believe this effort to create such an accessible, comprehensive, and community oriented site has the potential to drastically raise the general level of consciousness when it comes to drug knowledge among those with internet access.

Frankly, I don't think information can be spread too thinly, especially not in a wiki environment. The true beauty is that all the information is accessible and editable by hundreds (hopefully soon to be thousands) of members. There is no "stretch" because all it takes is a casual level of contribution from each member to far surpass the kind of man-hours that go into Erowid or other such sites. If people like the idea I believe the community will grow and flourish. If it really doesn't seem appealing then I'm sure it will stagnate and die, as internet community are want to do. I simply feel it's a very worthy idea to give it a shot. :D

Does that clear things up? I'd love to hear what you think.

 

[BilZ0r]

If information can't be spread to thinly, then how come you feel the need to archive information from your forum? Ive just seen about 5 projects start exactly like this, and none of them are here today, or those that are aren't worth talking about.

If I was going to put effort into making articles, (which I do), I would make sure that they were going to go on a place that a) they were going to be kept for as long as possible and b) were going to be read by as many people as possible.

Again, I can't see how the things you are mentioning can't be integrated into both wikipedia and erowid. I agree that wiki is a great format, and wikipedia is quickly becoming the central hub for information on the internet. I can't see why your not desperate to intergrate as much as possible with it. Likewise, the erowid trip report database is massive, and has a perfect search engine. Why wouldn't you want to centralize information with it?

If you take the erowid/bluelight neuropharmacology textbook that is being worked on here, I would love to put it on wikipedia, but it would cross on too many existing, so it goes on erowid, where it will quickly get a massive page rank on google by being there and become easily available to anyone who wants to find it.

I'm not trying to discourage your energy, I just wish it could be channelled into allready existing archives where I feel the information would be more accesible (easily found).

 

[Shadowstar]

I just wrote up a very fluid response even longer than the one below and lost it because my session seems to have timed out for some reason. This is without a doubt going to be choppier than the original and omit some important points that were included initially. So it goes.

I'm not sure what these other projects that you are refering to looked like, and how they mirrored ours. Were they wikis as well? I would like to hear more.

I would make one important distinction in regards to your first comment: There is a difference between archiving information like Erowid does and dynamically databasing it in such a way that it can be perfected by many minds into a form that approaches ideal.

The perhaps unique undertaking of TCCWik is to be an entirely community-driven project. The heads of thousands of drug-curious researchers could be put together not only to dynamically database and discuss information, but also to decide collectively the best method for running the site all together. After realizing the potential of Wikipedia I trust that this sort of undertaking can provide a truly evolved system of accessing and sharing information.

So what you could do with your article, if you were inclined to take part in this project, is post it twice. On Erowid it could take the famliar form of a static academic resource that provides a great service to the community by nature of its authority (hell, I cited your article on LSD pharmacology for a paper last semester). On TCCWiki your article would take the now-famliar wiki form of "take this with a grain of salt, but please edit and add your own comments to idealize the prose and content within". In time this might produce an updated community-written version of your original undertaking that could serve as a revision of your original prose.

The idea of this project is indeed to do both of the things you suggest: a) sticking around for as long as possible b) growing more and more in community to the point where it exists among the top tier of sites dedicated to drug knowledge such as Erowid, Bluelight, Lycaeum, and Wikipedia. Keep in mind that the primary benefit of this site is the accessibility, ease, and inclusiveness of an open-edit wiki. For most intrepid drug researchers like ourselves the combination of Erowid and high-quality forums is probably almost enough. A drug community wiki, with all its navigational and organizational benefits, could provide an amazing one-stop resource for newbie drug researchers and those with little inclination toward either internet-navigation or searching out multiple sources to develop an integrated understanding of a particular topic; for even on Erowid one must typically read a multitude of texts to even begining to access the big picture around a particular topic - only reading one can be highly misinformative or even dangerous. The "many heads are better than one" conglomeration of knowledge on a wiki could provide a detailed, interlinked summary of a particular topic while professionally citing and referencing the all-important static resources hosted on Erowid or other sites. While Wikipedia provides this service to some extent, our site could intentionally present information in such a way that is relevant for the drug user and advanced researcher, including subjective articles, technical guides, drug guides, grow guides, experience reports, and other such "unofficial" information that Wikipedia simply cannot offer, and for which Erowid does not offer open discussion or editability. This, of course, leads directly to your next point.

As I just proposed, there is a gap between Erowid and Wikipedia that I believe this project can bridge beautifully. Erowid has made brilliant attempts to integrate more subjective and common knowledge types of information through efforts such as the "Ask Erowid" feature. Unfortunately these responses are limited, often incomplete, and in fact tend to serve their purpose no better than a high-quality internet forum would. And of course they cannot be edited or discussed on the community space.

It should be noted that I am extremely desperate, as you say, to integrate this project with both Wikipedia and Erowid. I think there is an important overlap between all three sites that must be effectively acknowledge and utilized. It is my hope that people from both communities will work together with us to maximize the accessibility and organization of knowledge. For instance, we already have a couple people from Wikipedia:WikiProject Psychedelics, Dissociatives and Deliriants excited about and working on TCCWiki. I have every intention in starting a intensive dialogue with the Erowid team about how these projects can integrate and best benefit each other. This brief conversation with you has lit a fire under my ass in this regard, and I intend to start that conversation immediately after posting this; you bring up many excellent points that I would like to explore further with the Erowid team.

Your point about the Erowid experience reports database is a good one and well taken. It has inspired me to presently update all of our experience report pages with a strong suggestion that reports be submitted to Erowid as well as posted on the wiki for the sake of continuing such a wonderful central database.

What are the benefits to having experience reports on the wiki?

1) Erowid has hierarchical administrative control over all of their content. This gives them the sovereign ability to reject, censor, edit, and categorize experience reports. TCCWiki provides the completely free, community driven spread and organization of information. Edits are possible, which is useful for streamlining, but also cataloged, which prevents vandalism.

2) Interlinking provides supreme accessibility to relevant information. Reports can be full of links to articles about substances, people, events, and experiential terms (i.e. OEV, CEV, ego-loss), once again demonstrating the evolution in information gathering that wikis can provide.

I appreciate your final major concern. I am certainly interested in your thoughts on how I might more effectively help the community. I also invite your input about how this project can develop a mutually beneficial relationship with Erowid and offer these few final thoughts:

The idea behind the wiki is truly to become just accessible if not more accesible than Erowid. Certainly it would take us a long time to develop the kind of page-ranking that Erowid has, but the flip-side is the extremely potent intra-site accessibility of TCCWiki. Once somebody has found the site everything else drug-related that they could possibly be interested in is at their fingertips, often just one click away. As the bridging force, and hopefully one of the most active community drug projects on the net, the wiki has the potential to be a breeding ground for future Erowid articles, provide a one-stop interlinked source for summaries of all drug info with extensive citations and references to Erowid and other static texts, and most importantly to provide a singular community outlet where the entire community works together to decide how things are going to function. Why do we have so many different drug discussion forums anyway? Bluelight, shroomery, overgrow(?), TCC, Lycaeum, and on and on. The divisions between these sites are about politics, not particularly about content. The wiki has no administrative politics other than an overarching community apsiration toward a singular goal: dynamically databasing all drug-related information in a beneficial and contexual relationship with other databases such as Erowid and Wikipedia. I see the potential for all the drug experts out there to work collectively in a single area to provide an ever-increasing source of static information to Erowid and to constantly explore new realms of information and information-sharing. In fact, such a community driven project dedicated to summarizing and sharing basic information (both objective and subjective) could actually free the Erowid team to work more effortfully on their primary goal of being a library and a catalog.

Ultimately I am doing what in Tai Chi Chuan we call "investing in loss". I'm not out to neccesarily fight a particular political battle or even to see my initial plans followed through on. I simply hope to create space and inspiration for further exploring how this format can hugely benefit the overall drug community. Any further thoughts you might have would be most helpful. As I've said continually, the entire point of this is to have a community-run project that helps everybody. If the community dissents, let's find some way to make a change.

 

[BilZ0r]

I just wrote up a very fluid response even longer than the one below and lost it because my session seems to have timed out for some reason

Yeah, I hate it when that happens. I always copy my post before I send it, if it's more than a couple lines long.

subjective articles, technical guides, drug guides, grow guides, experience reports, and other such "unofficial" information that Wikipedia simply cannot offer, and for which Erowid does not offer open discussion or editability

Yeah.. maybe. I'm slightly more convinced.

Why do we have so many different drug discussion forums anyway? The divisions between these sites are about politics, not particularly about content.

I know this was probably an off the cuff statement, but I don't think it's entirely fair. For instance, I stopped posting at Overgrow (god rest it's soul) because people took offense if, when you told the truth about cannabis, you reported something bad about it. Likewise, I never bothered to post at the most of the entheogen forums, because there is too much hippy bullshit (IMO). My point is, you need seperate forums, because you need different environemnts for different people.

Still, I don't think there's any reason to have trip reports anywhere but erowid, I can't see the a wiki being as searchable as the erowid trip reports.

 

[Dancan]

You seem very driven and confident. But the issue still remains, how are people going to find this completely unknown site? How are you going to advertise?

Another major issue you will undoubtably be aware of is that it would take a very long time for you to gather enough information for your site to compete with the top drug resources on the internet. How are you going to gather this information without massive support, how are you going to gain this support without a details and informative website already in place to draw people?

So it's kind of a catch22, i assume you will respond with the fact that you are advertising to gain the initial informed supporters required to setup a reasonable about data, that would be required to draw new input to the site.

Your going to need to do alot of advertising...and maybe somehow make sure your website comes near the top for google searches such as drug information, drug resources, illegal chemical information etc...

Good luck, you better be as determined as you sound, or you shall be regreting the wasted time in the future.

 

[aabehayat]

Your going to need to do alot of advertising...and maybe somehow make sure your website comes near the top for google searches such as drug information, drug resources, illegal chemical information etc...

Good luck, you better be as determined as you sound, or you shall be regreting the wasted time in the future.

I disagree. There is no need for extensive ad campaigns and such, word of mouth is the best form of advertisement. Our entire forum on somethingawful knows about the wiki, and more and more are finding out about it daily.

While currently the wiki is very, very rough, but with time, and with a level-headed, intelligent, and well-spoken individual at the controls, I can see this project doing very well.

 

[Shadowstar]

You seem very driven and confident. But the issue still remains, how are people going to find this completely unknown site? How are you going to advertise?

Well we already have hundreds of users from our forum alone, and I've made threads on other major drug forums for exactly this reason. We'd like to spread the word. I also hope that eventually sites like Erowid and Bluelight will write articles about us and put up featured links in order to draw more eyes.

The SomethingAwful forums themselves have grown in six years to be the largest general discussion forums on the net without advertising at all. I don't think Erowid ever advertised much either. I'd prefer to allow this to grow organically, as the self-selective community is really the entire point of this project. As far as information I think I'd have to disagree with you. We already have almost 300 articles, a very active current events page, and many experience reports. There is already a pretty impressive array of information due to the freedom we have to proactively copy articles from Wikipedia to fill in major gaps. These obviously need some fruther revision and improvement in the future, but for now they provide a boon to our effort to establish a comprehensive database, at least as far as encyclopedic knowledge goes.

If just another 10 or 20 truly interested people get involved I think that this project has the potential to truly explode due to the ease of working with the Wiki. A couple people can create or edit several articles in one evening.

 

[Mind_Movie]

why waste time on making a specialized "drug wiki" if you already have wikipedia?

i visited tccwiki and wasn't too fond about the quality of the articles. just stick to wikipedia.

 

[BilZ0r]

^ Well the one reason I can think of, is because wikipedia might not want wikis on "how to build a bong" etc. They might, I don't know. But that's the kind of thing I'm thinking.

 

[Shadowstar]

why waste time on making a specialized "drug wiki" if you already have wikipedia?

i visited tccwiki and wasn't too fond about the quality of the articles. just stick to wikipedia.

If you read everything I've written in this thread (I know, it's a lot) I think you'll find I've address this pretty extensively in my responses to BilZ0r. There are two primary purposes: One is to cater even the encyclopedic articles to information most useful for the drug user and drug researcher, rather than the "general knowledge" theme that Wikipedia adheres too. The second is to do as BilZ0r just said: include rather subjective and unofficial information concerning how to perform certain drug activities. This includes guides, tips, tricks, and advice cocerning the use of a particular drug or drug combination, and technical guides around how to create and utilize paraphernalia or extracting/synthesizing certain chemicals.

 

[J. Alfred Prufrock]

.... technical guides around how to create and utilize paraphernalia or extracting/synthesizing certain chemicals.

While the thought has occurred to me that it might be interesting to have a wiki where people could contribute data related to the extraction and synthesis of certain chemicals, I don't think it'll happen. If it were possible, you'd see more information of this type on forums than you do, and I don't think you'll ever find those few contributors who could make it work. There's plenty of 'teks' to be found on other forums.

 

[Shadowstar]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that. We have a pretty impressive amount of well done extraction guides in our forum archives including ones for mescaline, salvinorum a, DMT, THC (for injection or transdermal use, two things experimented with by some of our posters), LSA, and certainly others that I don't recall at the moment. All it would take is an "aye" from the people who made these guides to database them on the wiki for future experimentation and revision. These things come up on forums enough that I think a number of people would be interested in working with such articles.

What do you think wouldn't work about this?

 

[OwnerofU]

Stop hating. give the site a chance.

 

[Shadowstar]

Yeah.. maybe. I'm slightly more convinced.

I thought I had responded to this. I made a double post actually, but now they're both gone. Did you delete them? I assume you saw them but I thought I'd write some of this up again since I'm uncertain that they are retrievable, and this seems like one of the best outlets I've explored so far in terms of getting interest about TCCWiki out there.

Anyway, it's good to hear you might be seeing some benefit in this. If you care to participate I'm sure you could offer a lot of good stuff on top of what we already have, and I'd be happy to talk to you about administrative status. This would allow to directly change the project and policy pages (i.e. improving the message I recently added to a few pages suggesting people post reports on Erowid as well).

I know this was probably an off the cuff statement, but I don't think it's entirely fair. For instance, I stopped posting at Overgrow (god rest it's soul) because people took offense if, when you told the truth about cannabis, you reported something bad about it. Likewise, I never bothered to post at the most of the entheogen forums, because there is too much hippy bullshit (IMO). My point is, you need seperate forums, because you need different environemnts for different people.

I should have explained that comment better. The differences in values, comfort with certain topics, attitude etc. are exactly what I meant by "political". Obviously this manifests in different content, but it stems from political decisions and views of the members of a forum (or the administrators of that forum). The only political statement of the wiki is to form a comprehensive surface-level resource for all drug-related information. There is no hierarchical control beyond basic measures to prevent vandalism, and even those policies can be influenced by the consensus of the community. On the wiki you'd have a huge swath of people supporting your effort to spread truth about cannabis, those who didn't want to hear it would presumably aquiesce based on the overall goals of the project. Likewise, you would have no need to explore the topics you don't like. Everybody contributes where their passions and expertise lie. Perhaps after a few months of work by people who are passionate about shamanism, mystical experiences and other topics associated with psychedelics you would find a somewhat idealized article that you can actually connect with and even contribute to.

In this way the entire environment is shared by everybody with a common goal toward information sharing, but the specificity of the topic matter explored is entirely up to the user. In the end, with enough work, everything can be presented in a way that is useful to almost anybody.

Still, I don't think there's any reason to have trip reports anywhere but erowid, I can't see the a wiki being as searchable as the erowid trip reports.

My basic philosophy about this is why not have experience reports? After all you have them here at Blueight, we report them on TCC, they are cataloged in many places. The feature of sharing personal experiences allows us to get to know eachother better, provides a safe and inclusive community, and is generally a part of the "all" in "all drug related knowledge" that falls under the auspices of TCCWiki. The purpose is not so much to archive them ad infinitum as Erowid does, but to provide them as a useful aspect of our greater community.

The nice thing about reading reports on the wiki, as I said above, is the ability to interlink, and also to be able to see all of one person's information in one spot. Reports are posted on a person's User page. This way when you click on an experience report link you are on the same page that potentially contains for that experiencer: a picture, personal statistics, interests, contributions to the wiki, etc. as well as all of the other reports by that person either on the same page or one click away on a subpage. If you go to my user page (user:Shadowstar in the search box) you'll see my own example, although I only have one report up so far.

 

[Manic Star]

Been lurking over on TCC for years now and this project has looked awesome from the start. With enough contributions it could develop into a great community and source of information, and I guess the beauty of a wiki is that the bigger it gets and the more people it attracts, the more new material is likely to be generated...

Best of luck with the site.

 

[BilZ0r]

Um, yeah, why not have trip reports? Well I would completely agree IF all trip reports were dupilcated onto erowid, however we both know that's not going to happen. And why I think erowid is better than a wiki for trip reports is the amazing search engine they have.

By encouraging trip reports, you take them away from erowid, and I don't think that's good.

And one problem with having trip reports attatched to a community is the dick-sizing that goes on. I'm in no doubt that some trip reports are complete fabrications, by people who feel that having "far out" trip reports will somehow make them cooler. But that's really by the by.

Anyway, I'll keep a close eye on the ole TCC wiki, and keep us updated with any changes and whatnot.

 

[Shadowstar]

So you are pretty actively opposed to having the trip reports forum here as well?

I admit I'm a little confused. The effort is to encourage reports to first and foremost be submitted to Erowid. You've certainly already influenced me on this. I'm not sure why that means they cannot be shared among community members anywhere else.

And yes I will definitely let you all know what's going on, especially regarding my conversation with the Erowid team. Thanks for all your really helpful input and advice.

 

[J. Alfred Prufrock]

What do you think wouldn't work about this?

As with all these formats, the issue is one of quality and accuracy of information. How have you addressed this?

One suggestion is to do kind of what you've done here. Try to recruit some experts. BilZ0r is certainty a good choice, but how directly have you asked for his assistance? By starting this thread? Do you have anyone else you could get to help you? Who else has signed on to the project at this point?