Hey Phil - I work for a small wiki called "Wikinvest", and we've been working on a wiki for data for a few months now (data being especially important for investors). We should be launching it next week, at which point you can come check it out for yourself, but in the meantime TechCrunch wrote about us a bit the other week and has some screenshots, here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/06/wikinvest-to-add-unique-comp-data-for-s...
There are a few important features that we thought a "wiki for data" should have:
1) Datapoints may appear in many places on the site; anywhere updated should mean everywhere updated 2) Standard revision control features of a wiki should apply - people can change datapoints where they believe they have better information, those changes are surfaced in "recent changes", data has a history page and changes can be reverted, and we insist on sources for all data that is added or changed. 3) This is mostly applicable to us - the browse for data is organized in such a way that all data is associate with a company page and a metric page. So, for example, if I was reading an article about american airlines I could click on the "data tab" to see all the data for this company. One piece of data would be Revenue per Available Seat Mile (an important metric in the airline industry). If I clicked on "Revenue per Available Seat Mile" I'd be taken to a page with that data for all companies for which it was available...
What we're building might give you some ideas, or perhaps there's a way we can collaborate.
/prc
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
One of the frequent inclusion/deletion arguments has been over "cruft" of various sorts - plot summaries, "in popular culture" sections, strange but interesting lists ("List of songs that mention the title over n times" where n was something weird and large was an old favorite), etc. The basic problem in these cases is that while the information is often verifiable, it seems somewhat tangental to a reasoned and well-organized presentation of major facts on a subject.
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I propose that we need to dramatically rethink how we treat chunks of data on Wikipedia. In many cases - from fictional topics to real-world ones - there is often a large chunk of information that is worth presenting, but that does not present well in article form. Our current method of spin-off and sub-articles leaves us with a mass of articles that often make poor articles even as they contain valuable information. (And I would say that [[School Hard]] and [[Political positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton]] are articles of more or less exactly equal quality)
In more practical terms, what I'm imagining would be an article on, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had some clear link to data and sidebars. Click on it, and a navigational engine comes up that guides you through the sidebar content - a list of episodes that one could delve into and, from there, get plot summaries, credits, overviews of reviews, etc. A list of characters, an overview of critical commentaries, heck, a huge link collection of reviews of the series or of episodes. In other words, a way of having our article - structured with a clear lead section, and specific, well-sourced sections - be the top layer of a mass of well-organized content. Something that gives us an option for a topic beyond "have an article on it," "don't have an article on it," or "throw it into a messy list that doesn't quite function as an article."
Thoughts?
-Phil