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
On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 10:49:28 +0000, Charles Matthews wrote:
> Two or three years ago I was much more in the thick of things, and I
> remember telling a rather bemused American at dinner at the Alexandria
> Wikimania about the four political parties on enWP.
Do you have an online description of those four parties? It's harder
to follow your comments without that.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:17:36 -0500, Anthony wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:02 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 10:15 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >>Ensure that (administrators|wardens|whatever we decide to call them) feel no qualms
> >>about >kicking out clearly disruptive people.
> >
> > If it was clear to everyone who the disruptive people were, there
> > would never be any problems. But one person's troll is another
> > person's misunderstood genius.
>
> It doesn't have to be clear to everyone, just to the people in charge.
...if you favor a top-down authoritarian model in which nobody
outside a small ruling clique has any say in things. And if any of
the rabble object to that, just call them trolls too and kick them
out as well.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
G'day folks,
Reuters reports that Cuba has started its own online encyclopedia.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCATRE6BD02E20101214?sp=true
Cuba has begun its own online encyclopedia, similar to Wikipedia, with the
goal of presenting its version of the world and history.
It describes its longtime ideological enemy, the United States, as "the
empire of our time" and "the most powerful nation of all time."
EcuRed (www.ecured.cu) will be launched officially on Tuesday, but it was
already up and running on Monday, with 19,345 entries.
It was developed "to create and disseminate the knowledge of all and for
all, from Cuba and with the world," the site said.
Users supposedly will be able to update entries with prior approval from
EcuRed administrators.
"Its philosophy is the accumulation and development of knowledge, with a
democratizing, not profitable, objective, from a decolonizer point of view,"
the site said.
(More in story)
Regards
*Keith Old
*
--
Keith Old
62050121 (w)
62825360 (h)
0429478376 (m)
Alex Bateman and Darren Logan have written in this week's
Nature, suggesting that scientists contribute content to
Wikipedia rather than simply using it.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/468765c
JFW
I just noticed this in this week's Signpost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-12-06/GLAM-W…
It's my own fault for not paying closer attention (it had been
advertised elsewhere), but I would have loved to have gone to this.
Which mailing list would be more appropriate to be subscribed to to
get details of things like this?
Carcharoth
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 13:43, wiki <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
> FA tends to concentrate on specialist articles - because it is the only
> place a FA writer or two can be left alone to work on it without a hoard on
> POV pushers and school kids.
>
> It is a pity we can't find ways of getting people to work on bringing core
> articles (by which I mean subjects that would be in a 3,000 article max set
> of paper encyclopaedias) up to scratch.
To get people to work on improving these to FA standard, you would
need to protect them against editing by others, and no one would buy
that. That's why most FA articles are on topics where fewer people
want to contribute. The process of getting an article to FA standard
usually depends on one person, or perhaps a small group of like-minded
people.
Sarah
I know everybody is tired of hearing me bang on about this, but the
whole "Featured article" edifice has always seemed dubious to me. It
seems to concentrate our limited resources on a tiny number of
articles, and the emphasis has always been more on dotting eyes and
crossing tees than improving overall quality of coverage.
At least one intensive study has shown that much of Wikipedia works
best when multiple loosely committed editors (domain experts) add most
of the useful content then Wikipedians take care of filtering and
improving presentation. I don't see anything wrong with that; there's
no way that our relatively small active userbase (and it was *always*
small) could have built this huge encyclopedia.
If we're getting fewer people jumping in and adding stuff, at least
part of the reason is that nearly everything that is worth adding is
already here and by now most people know the line of material we are
likely to reject.
Exponential growth was never an expectation of the Wikipedia project.