[WikiEN-l] Web 3.0?

[Charles Matthews]

I knew little about Web 3.0 (WP and Facebook and don't care having shown 
Web 2.0 to be something rather than nothing) until I talked to Andrew 
Turvey and Mike Peel of WMUK in a Starbucks one day. And I later 
realised that some of what I had heard made sense. I floated this at the 
London meetup on Sunday. Like an old IQ test:

Yahoo is to WP as Google is to ???

??? is supposed to be essence of Web 3.0 or something. Anyway I may have 
the terminology hilariously wrong but the question remains. But needs 
background, so here goes.

Tim Berners-Lee wants us to be interested in the "deep Web", i.e. 
crawler-baffling pages such as those in databases that you only get to 
read by filling in a web form with "open" and "sesame". WP uses such 
pages by citing by hand, often with a citation template that contains 
the page identifier so one person searches the database, thousands get 
the right page for the article. This is a real plus: call it "dredging", 
given that most WP pages are "shallow Web", in fact hardly over the ankles.

So what would the successor paradigm be? If Yahoo is to Google is as 
hand-compiled lists is to pages algorithmically sorted for relevance 
(close enough to what I mean), we should be looking at some "does not 
suck" aggregator type model that produces readable prose: articles, 
dammit, not 367 hits to scroll through.

I floated another model, though, "mother of all infoboxes", i.e. reduce 
prose to minimum. And we should remember that in hypertext the article 
is _not_ the unit. That is like saying that in an academic book the 
footnote is the unit.

These ideas still seem to be half-baked.

Interesting times still await after the 10th anniversary. BTW anyone 
here also on LinkedIn (that means you Phoebe, and others) simply must 
join the Wikiversary group there which has just been founded. Not by me.

Charles