WikiPoets

Wiki-Poetry is an as yet unrealised idea for a collective poetry writing site with using wiki in the English language. However, one non-English example of successful project using and maintaining the wiki-mentality for producing a collective and complex poetry work is the Italian wiki-poetry project produced by the literature group Nuoviautori.org which can be found on http://nuoviautori.wikispaces.com. Due to the quality of the produced work, the group is founding a new literature movement called wikismo (or in English wikism) with the collaboration of established and emergent authors, literature reviews and publishers. Unfortunately, apart from this initiative in Italy there are no other projects showing the same maturity level as the Italian one.

There is another small experiment in the sandbox, sandbox poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox/Poetry, where people can add their poems and votes on poems they like or dislike. However, it says boldly 'DO NOT EDIT OTHER PEOPLE'S POEMS'. This seems out of the spirit of Wikipedia. Surely there are otther places on the Web, or on Wikipedia, to merely display poetry. More in keeping with the wiki-mentality would be a collective-poem writing portal with stubs, featured poems, ideas, proposals which says 'PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EDIT THE POEMS'. As with other pages, content would be put on. Then others (in discusion) could add, edit, copy, reorganize etc. History could be kept – poems can split in two like a forked path – and join together like tributaries to a great river.

There is another small experiment in Italy (less than 1,000 pages), not a Wikimedia project, called WikiPoesia started in 2019. It is a Wiki for Poetry and is managed by a private no profit group.https://www.wikipoesia.it

There should be a proposal section. You could start a poem and ask others to complete it. Poems could be divided into categories: narrative, didactic, humorous, blank verse, epic, ‘hip-hop’ etc. poetry; and themes: death, Renaissance, Internet, nature, revolution etc.!

If this exists already on the web, we are unaware. But the idea of poems being the collective work of society, and not that of the individual goes back to antiquity. Much of ancient, specifically Homeric, poetry was made in a similar collaborative effort. There was not one version of a poem, but the poems were turned by different tongues and progressively modified – whilst retaining the same central story. The only difference with Wikipoetry is that the poets would be using their keyboards instead of tongues.

If successful, this format could be used for other story-creating projects in prose.

Possible problems: What is the full copyright policy of Wikipedia? Would there be problems with collectively writing poetry, and what if someone publishes it?

This might be liked to WikiFiction project http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikifiction

http://novelas.wikicities.com/wiki/Narrative_Poems#epic_historical_poems

As an experiment: PLEASE CONTRIBUTE, EDIT, ADD, CUT, POEMS AND IDEAS

Poem idea 1: An introduction to Wikipedia. No tech jargon, focus on what wikipedia can do.

Poem idea 2: A short poem summarising WikiEtiquette.

Poem idea 3:

Discussion

How about the fun to search [1]? --Somebody 13:23, 6 August 2006 (UTC)