Persuasion forum?

There are a lot of topics in the world surrounding permaculture that can be hard for people to swallow on their first introduction, and there are also a lot of beliefs that people hold that deserve to be challenged with a permaculture perspective. One thing that seems to be consistently difficult for most people (myself included) is finding the right words to explain something or argue something clearly and calmly in the face of bad reasoning. I was thinking that there are a zillion people here who have the knowledge to put together a sort of "best sound reasoning" library of explanations and rational arguments that could be a really valuable resource for the group as a whole in situations like when you're at a party and somebody says something like "Everybody knows organic farming can't feed the world, so <insert crazy stuff here>" or "Planned obsolescence creates jobs, so it's a good thing"

Would anybody else be interested in having a forum or wiki or something dedicated to putting some of these common topics into the clearest possible words? There would have to be some kind of ground rules so that the threads didn't turn into flame wars all the time.. maybe say that each thread is for the development of a specific explanation or case, and other positions on the issue would have to be in separate threads or something. If it could be made to work I think it might be a really handy thing, but it could also turn into a black hole of time commitment for moderators if it didn't work out.

Ta dah! We have a wiki, and I think it's a great idea that's why I was one of its pioneers.

Knowledge needs to accumulate, and a wiki is a great place to do that.

Here is the link https://permies.com/wiki/

Hope this helps,

Awesome! I'll get to work on that planned obsolescence topic...

Jami -- I tried to start a new page on the wiki, but none of the editing links work for me. Is there an additional step I'm missing to get to where I can generate some content for it? The links at the top and bottom either just reload the current page or take me to the permies.com homepage when I click them.

I did a little poking around and I can get to the edit page by manually editing the address in the location bar -- so the edit functionality is present but unreachable by the links. The other thing is that it's asking for a login to edit the pages, but it doesn't recognize my permies account.

Here's the text of the url that I see for the edit link on the categories page: https://permies.com/Permaculture/Categories?action=edit
This is the url I used to reach the actual edit page (it was password protected for all the pages I tried): https://permies.com/wiki/index.php?n=Permaculture.Categories&action=edit

I can access the other page functions as well by manually changing the &action= part for each operation.

I tried fiddling with some browser settings as well to see if maybe my firefox addons were causing the problem, but they didn't seem to make any difference one way or the other. If it matters, I'm using firefox 10.0.2 on a linux system.

Agreed with Jami on the value of a wiki. You're also very, very welcome to add a little bit (or a lot) about this to Appropedia. Paul likes Appropedia, so I know he won't mind me saying that.