Board Thread:Legislation/@comment-5843134-20150327185832/@comment-3817-20150407210837

Chat room: Can't comment, mostly because I haven't been around; but to be honest, I have yet to see any community these days that really uses chatrooms anymore.

On quality standards: Okay, there's two parts to this - one regarding the content regardless of topic, and the second regarding Micronations themselves.

Agreeing on the former, I'd say, is fairly straightforward: if we want high-quality content, we should find structures to define and subsequently define high-quality content. We need to give people guidelines regarding what kinds of content are desired (guides/essays, national dossiers, personal dossiers, historical and event descriptions) and constructive advice as to what is considered high-quality, starting with good grammar up to rules on what is to be assumed factual and what isn't.

That brings me to the second aspect of this: "Serious" and "believable" both are difficult definitions to work with when talking about micronations. Micronations are hard to define because requiring territoriality dismisses the social aspect of a micronation and would cut the scope of this wiki down to cover basically 1:1 what Wikipedia already does. It also makes it very US-centric - something like Molossia would be both legally and geographically impossible in most European nations.

On the other hand, the temptation is great for individuals to found one-person Micronations that are basically creative writing exercises. These are fine, of course, but we've seen some tip towards ego trips in the past.

Off the top of my head, I can imagine two possible solutions for this: one, a set of hard relevancy criteria, requirements for a micronation to be considered relevant (population, territoriality, whatever). Since this would however be easy to circumvent and extremely hard to enforce, I'd advise against it. Secondly, it might be worth working on a typology of micronations. The way I see it, we have the following functions existing in some combination in any micronation:

- A territorial quasi-state (e.g. Molossia, Sealand, Hutt River Province)

- A social community (mostly a group of same-minded people)

- A political simulation (mostly preoccupied with the simulation of political dynamics)

- A roleplaying game (differentiated by "players" acting in a virtual space of some kind unter an alias)

- A satirical project (making fun of real-world or micronational politics)

- A real-life activist group (under the guise of a micronation, a group that somehow seeks improvement of real-world society)

- A virtual meta-nation (community spanning multiple micronations)

- An individual writing exercise (consisting of one or a small amount of contributors)

Differently put, micronations can be physical, virtual, social, creative or gamistic, or any combination thereof. I'm not sure if that could provide a starting point for a typology, but I'd say that instead of kicking out a number of potential contributors from the get-go, it would be better to include them, albeit with a clear sense of what each micronation actually is.

Sorry if I rambled on a bit there, the whole "what is a micronation" question has been burning in my mind for literally a decade.