The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump (WikiDumper.org)
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Discuss: Wikipedia Ideas
Wikipedia is a marvelous tool. What features would you most like to see added to Wikipedia to make it even better, for example, to make it even more usable?
For example, I’d like to see an option that may be selected to temporarily color code text by date of entry. Thus, text that was green, because it was five years old, might be more “trustworthy” than text that was red, which was ten minutes old or text that is orange that is two days old. The color option may be toggled on an off by the user.
# posted by Cliff Pickover @ 6:24 AM 
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Cliff,
Your WikiDumper site illustrates a fundamental weakness of the Wikipedia. It is not a democratic site to which anyone can contribute their knowledge. Sure, you can contribute, but every day over one hundred articles are marked for deletion by the Wikipedia elite. Reasons for the dump are often subjective. The elite does not think that a piece of knowledge is notable enough, e.g. a biographical entry is about someone who does not have enough Google hits. How many is enough? 100? 1000? 10,000? Is Google the final arbiter? Why not have a book of all knowledge, rather than a book of knowledge deemed notable by an elite gang.
Regards, -Paul
Your WikiDumper site illustrates a fundamental weakness of the Wikipedia. It is not a democratic site to which anyone can contribute their knowledge. Sure, you can contribute, but every day over one hundred articles are marked for deletion by the Wikipedia elite. Reasons for the dump are often subjective. The elite does not think that a piece of knowledge is notable enough, e.g. a biographical entry is about someone who does not have enough Google hits. How many is enough? 100? 1000? 10,000? Is Google the final arbiter? Why not have a book of all knowledge, rather than a book of knowledge deemed notable by an elite gang.
Regards, -Paul
# posted by 
: 11:41 AM
: 11:41 AM
Hope this doesn't count as spam, but I've written a lot about this kind of thing on my blog. Here's the relevant section: http://wikip.blogspot.com/search/label/sociology
First, great site. Really cool idea and should be a lot of fun to check in on from time to time.
Second, what I'd like to see from Wikipedia would be greater utility out of their "discussion" pages. As it stands, they're set up a lot like the "article" pages where anyone is free to edit anything anywhere anytime with, of course, a record being kept somewhere. For someone who uses a lot of wikis it's probably intuitive. But for me, I find it a muddled mess that's hard to use. I'd rather the discussion pages were a lot more like a traditional message board or this comment page. A permanent, persistent record of people talking to each other about something that can be refered to and used by just about anyone without any specialized knowledge. Because, for me, this is intuitive. And I'm not exactly unused to using wikis (and other forms and formats).
So, in short, I'd like to see an effort for a better interface for user input without having to edit a whole page. A threaded message board for discussions is the first step I'd take there but I'd go beyond to link placement and more. In general more automation, more customization, more user friendly, less clunky stuff. I don't want to think about it, I just want to do it. Just making it easier for more people to get involved and to contribute. Can't get rid of that elite gang of Wikipedia users but can at least make it bigger.
Which sounds a lot like Wetpaint which Ben mentions on his site (So, don't worry Ben, it might be spam for Cliff, but I checked it out and found it interesting. What more can you want?) in the untitled post from June 20th. I just got the gist so I'll leave it to Ben or someone else to explain better.
Second, what I'd like to see from Wikipedia would be greater utility out of their "discussion" pages. As it stands, they're set up a lot like the "article" pages where anyone is free to edit anything anywhere anytime with, of course, a record being kept somewhere. For someone who uses a lot of wikis it's probably intuitive. But for me, I find it a muddled mess that's hard to use. I'd rather the discussion pages were a lot more like a traditional message board or this comment page. A permanent, persistent record of people talking to each other about something that can be refered to and used by just about anyone without any specialized knowledge. Because, for me, this is intuitive. And I'm not exactly unused to using wikis (and other forms and formats).
So, in short, I'd like to see an effort for a better interface for user input without having to edit a whole page. A threaded message board for discussions is the first step I'd take there but I'd go beyond to link placement and more. In general more automation, more customization, more user friendly, less clunky stuff. I don't want to think about it, I just want to do it. Just making it easier for more people to get involved and to contribute. Can't get rid of that elite gang of Wikipedia users but can at least make it bigger.
Which sounds a lot like Wetpaint which Ben mentions on his site (So, don't worry Ben, it might be spam for Cliff, but I checked it out and found it interesting. What more can you want?) in the untitled post from June 20th. I just got the gist so I'll leave it to Ben or someone else to explain better.
This is basically the old IBM historyflow tool in different clothing. The problem with historyflow is that it's extremely slow, and it's not something that could be generated on the fly on a regular basis without substantially more investment in server hardware by Wikimedia.
I'd like to see something geared toward the future development of ideas or theories. If Wikipedia collects all present knowledge, and Wikiquote collects all past knowledge written in books, where is the Wiki for future knowledge? The 'pedia already has the term "original research", but attaches a negative connotation, and removes any "original research" from articles. But what about a wiki that supports and encourages such research? I suppose it would involve much discussion, like the Talk pages, but with some structure and good tools, perhaps it could become a meeting place, an online chalkboard, a laboratory, and a classroom wrapped into one?
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