We are proposing __One World__ as a simple umbrella theme for Wikipedia's 20th Birthday because in many ways the first edit on Wikipedia symbolises the first time anyone in the world could participate in a single common globally relevant activity. It was the first time the world spoke with one voice.
Wikipedia represents the best know way we have found to date that people around the world can collaborate to create shared knowledge. It achieves this result through an informal, but structured set of social techniques mediated by technology.
The end result is what we might call consensual writing, which has the advantage of being able to synthesise many voices into a single concise and coherent proposition. This Synthetic View has the disadvantage of giving little space for new or alternative perspectives which fail to reach such consensus.
# Theme
Picture holding up a globe or football: > One World, in your hands > One Voice, it's yours that counts
# Collective The theme is essentially about the pressing need for better collective decision making and action. We examine wiki as the best know example of planetary scale collective action, and we ask how we can use this to address the problems that we face.
We move between the one, and the many. This is like moving between Federated Wiki, and Wikipedia, or the divergent and the convergent.
We can explore themes about the individual and the things we can do to act, and the collective - the ways we can come together to address collective problems.
We consider the following rhyme: - One World - One Game - One Football
Alternative themes or related concepts I list below: