Hi, folks,
Recently Lila had talk about #1 challenge in this mail-list which is related to participation. I want to recall Ward Cunningham's idea of observability in the very early days of wiki invention to address the possibility to enhance participation of Wikipedia today.
If you visit the early page of c2.com, you will find the idea of observability is one pillar principle of wiki software, and just follow the idea, Ward invent the RecentChanges for all wikis.
At that time c2 is very small; now Wikipedia is so big. The original idea of RecentChanges is not very effective today. We had made some extension for the original idea in our mediawiki software, but I think the step is too small.
Let's first take a look of what we had already invented are similar to RecentChanges but more effective:
* Wikizine or Signpost: community stories every week * some part of a Portal: recent changes under a subject compiled by human
Still possible for other kind of RecentChanges which is not invented yet, for example: * References and external links are very valuable resources, why not extract them from articles and compile them into a timeline?
Content is only one aspect to observe, people are another: * Who are the experts on some topics? * Who are my buddies on some articles? * Who did help me to improve an article originally I wrote?
In all, we may reshape our technical infrastructure in this direction for new spaces of participation. And finally, one open question for the system designer:
* Towards better content and community, what is the most important things we want our user to observe?
Regards, Mingli