Maybe there’s a way to give multiple starting points, and see if/how they might converge. Or some kind of structured Q&A process – a much narrower subject every week, or an interactive questionnaire where your answers affect the questions you get asked. Maybe it’s a twist on the wiki idea, or maybe the right tool just doesn’t exist yet.

Or maybe UK politics is too confrontational for any kind of consensus-based approach. I suppose if you really dislike one or more of the current lot’s policies, you get a chance to delete the whole lot once every four or five years.

If that move had been unacceptable (and I suspect it would have been) then this is an unsuitable use of the wiki format. Approval is invisible, but opposition is impossible.

Open a forum, invite comments, great, but a wiki for something as important and contentious as the way citizens and government will protect the environment? What were they thinking?

Was Miliband purely seeking approval for a ‘fait accompli’? Hardly. A wiki, by definition, is about showing your opposition (your word) to what’s already there, and proactively changing it. In the wiki world, approval is effectively invisible. And besides, if it was just about rubber-stamping a ‘fait accompli’, there are plenty of safer and better established ways to do that.

‘Babble’ or not, I still think somebody has to produce the first draft as a starting point. And as the individual nominated (and indeed paid) to represent the nation on these matters, surely the Secretary of State should be the one to do so.

The vandals would probably argue that this project failed not because of their destructiveness but because an authority figure setting out policy and asking for refinements is not asking for opposition, only approval.

This contract was a mealy-mouthed fait accompli, not an exercise in inclusion.

Wikis have to be produced from the bottom up. The first draft should have been a blank sheet, not a page of babble, don’t you think?

“A spokeswoman for Miliband’s department said officials were reviewing security of the site. ‘This in no way undermines our commitment as a department to dealing with serious issues and using new technology to pioneer an open style of government,’ she said, on condition of anonymity in line with policy.”

Miliband has form: “He sees policy as something that has to be worked out and pushed through the policy forums, the conference, the Cabinet and the Commons. There’s no real participatory element in it.” – Benn Diaries (Free at Last!) p643

The Wiki idea is a good one for collaborative projects. Politics is not collaborative. The reality is that politics is a clash of ideas and ideology as well as parties. Only a deluded wonk would overlook that non-trivial detail.

Wiki’s can only effectively work as policy development tools when used by a community with common values. The policy making political class do not have common values.

So if you invite those who oppose your ideas to contribute to refining them you should not be surprised when they seek to frustrate your objectives.

Miliband is the wonk equivalent of the nutty professor. He seems surprised that his experiment has blown up in his face.

A few weeks back the UK Environment Department DEFRA put up a wiki encouraging people to help develop an environmental contract, to tackle climate change and other key issues, by directly adding to the web pages online. It didn’t get