The main functionality of an encyclopedia is help people find background
knowledge for their questions.
Wikipedia as an encyclopedia still keep this functionality as the main usage
pattern, if I am not wrong.
But we can still observed other usage patterns, for example in the Mainpage
and Portals,
the changes on them reflect the news outside or editing progress inside.
And gradually even rss file was generated by bot to broadcast these changes.
I call this pattern a pushing pattern.
Let's back to the mission of Wikimedia movement: making knowledge reach all
the people on the planet.
Why can we not push knowledge to the people?
I know, from the most latin-language-version point of view, this idea is not
very attractive,
because Wikipedia is already the 5 biggest website on the planet.
But as the case for Chinese Wikipedia, we still at the poor position of
50th~100th popular website.
That is why I start my work on
wikiedge.org, a re-mix website for good
wikipedia content.
I don't want stop at this higher level but I will propose a low level idea:
the concept of knowledge block.
In one word: knowledge block is a data exchange format to
enable broadcasting of good wikimedia content.
For example, the data exchange format would be:
* title
* permalink of the article
* leading sentence
* abstract
* tags
* categories
* the main photos
* related photos
If the community process (in generating dyk, itn, otd, feature and
featurpic) and supporting technology could provide these meta date, we
could:
* twitter: leading sentence + permalink + photos
* an online magazine: abstract + photos + fulltext
* a blog: abstract + photos + fulltext + categories + tags
* ...
We could push our knowledge into many different channels.
It need the community and technology guys to wrok together to implement the
idea.
And I want to make this real in Chinese Wikipedia.
Thanks for comments, critics and advice.
Regards,
Mingli