Looking over the thread, there are lots of good ideas. Its really important to have some plan towards cleaning up abstractions between "structured data", "procedures in representation", "visual representation" and "tools for participation".
But, I think its correct to identify the social aspects of the projects as more critical than purity of abstractions within wikitext. Tools, bots and scripts and clever ui components can abstract away some of the pain of the underlining platform as long as people are willing to accept a bit of abstraction leakage / lack of coverage in some areas as part of moving to something better. One area that I did not see much mention of in this thread is automated systems for reputation. Reputation systems would be useful both for user interactions and for gauging expertise within particular knowledge domains. Social capital within wikikmedia projects is presently stored in incredibly unstructured ways and has little bearing on user privileges or how the actions of others are represented to you, and how your actions are represented to others. Its presently based on traditional small scale capacities of individuals to gauge social standing within their social networks and or to read user pages. We can see automatic reputation system emerging anytime you want to share anything online be it making a small loan to trading used DVDs. Sharing information should adopt some similar principals. There has been some good work done in this area with wikitrust system ( and other user moderation / karma systems ). Tying that data into smart interface flows that reward positive social behaviour and productive contributions, should make it "more fun" to participate in the projects and result in more fluid higher quality information sharing. peace, --michael On 12/29/2010 01:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: > I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber > kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. > > But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. > > Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you > are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be > paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: > > 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on > your content. > > 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But > make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. > > 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of > super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. > > In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something > from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was > disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like > Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? > > And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people > and can guess what it is. > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
