[quote="Jakkal"]I'm not really sure where you're coming from, or where you got the idea that the users of Crossroads said only 'elders' should be allowed to make definitions.  I think you misinterpretted them, when they were merely concerned about new people, with their own misconceptions, changing or trying to rearrange therianthropy to include themselves.[/quote]

I guess I should be laughing here, because in the 6 hours I have spent on Crossroads, I have encountered at least 3 seperate cases of obvious disagreement between the therians there. And then I'm told there is no lack in communication.

Well what you just stated is a contradiction onto itself. In essence who will then decide who has a right to define therian terms and who not? The moment anyone starts deciding that, you risk leaving a part of the scene out.

Now I understand that anti-faker paranoia and I also well understand it is unnecesary as fake people do not bare much credibility when you have the option of comparing it to the real thing. But even if the foundations for that type of conclusion would be perfectly well baised, the therian community does still have a great deal of inter-acceptance to do and this isn't something I'd be willing to ignore when setting up a resource for all the therian comunity to use.

[quote="Jakkal"]In addition, While your wiki has merit, it's hardly logical to complain about no one bridging the gaps and creating new sites when you're doing the exact same thing.

Shifters.Org was originally built for this purpose, whereas anyone could submit information and essays and it was mostly built based around that.  I may have written a lot of it, but the input I got was across the community for over 10 years now.  The Werelist is also another bridge-maker in the community, doing an exceptional job in the history of the community to pull people together from all the therian communty/information sites.

If you -really- want to help the community, you should try to build up the currently available resources instead of attempting to build your own isolated island in the vast seas of therianthropy.[/quote]

Well that was my point. If you want to see how that is done, check my Encyclopedia, it has links to as many other resources I could find and being a wiki, it provides them in a convenient manner.

If we can work togather, we will help route a lot of the information-hungry visitors to the sites with the right information and a linking resource such as a Wiki can help you do that.

And Coyote also makes a few very good points:
[quote="Coyote"]When it all boils down, unless you run a site where content is completely urestricted, and anyone can modify, post, etc. all they want, you still end up running a site where one person gets to decide what does or does not go up as informational material.

I don't see anything wrong with creating a new resource. But it's also a good idea to support and take advantage of existing ones also. If you get into an adversarial pissing contest with _anyone_, much less a site-maintainer, you and they generally end up creating rifts, not bringing people together or clearing up misunderstandings.[/quote]

That is, according to my experience in webbing, all the free resources can be a great thing, but if you end up depending on a person to get your stuff posted you have two major problems:
1. There is an emotional element to it, the admin may not like you for whatever reason and your work, no matter how good, is doomed
2. There will most likely be a problem with timing somewhere allong the line, when the person moderating it all will be ready to take time on the works submitted and respect everybody's right to have an oppinion, but simply not have the time to pass it trough (I webmaster several websites and I know even the smallest bit of work can take months to do when you have other things to do in life, more relevant to your survival).

Computersystems are an excelent answer to this and this has been prooven again and again trough everything from electronic government insititutions to PHP Bulletin Boards. And this is what the whole WikiTiki software platform is based on.

[quote="Coyote"]One one end of the spectrum, you have no control over content, and any yo-yo can put any crazy or disruptive thing up (browse through Urban dictionary sometime). On the other end, you have a single person controlling all information, and they become the sole arbiter (at least in their mind) of what is valuable or true.[/quote]

I understand the dilema, but having a kind of democracy where everybody has a right to say his bit and where inter-control, discussion and open-minded thinking replaces strict censorship, when it is plausible to implement, is the way to go.

You see, as everybody has access to the Wiki, there is no problem at all in logging in and fixing up what you think is innacurate. However when it ends up to be a war of words, and it is obvious that certian types of censorship is not socially acceptable (for example deleting out other people's defenitions), that will also in no doubt be noticed and debated upon. The wiki resource simply allows for that to actually ever take place.