I have an Idea for a Wikigame that perhaps, with your resources and skills, you could develop and market to generate income to help finance the Wiki Foundation. The idea is a gift to the foundation, should you decide to accept it, free of any encumbrances, though I would like to be credited for the original idea. I thought of the game while exploring the "random article" feature. I consecutively generate two random articles and attempt to navigate from one to the other using the links in the articles.(e.g Black Guards->Ship in a Bottle(TGN episode)) Of course it doesn't work 100% of the time but that can be worked out by limiting the random generation to articles that will link. I find it educational as well as entertaining in that it requires the player to read the article and formulate the best route to the destination. Once you begin playing with the idea you will see that there is a lot of room for developing software to facilitate several variations of this theme: A solitary mode with it's own scoring system and a multiplayer mode. The software could ensure that pathways exist from the starting point to the destination article. Various scoring systems are possible. Points awarded for time, shortest route, points deducted for backtracks, loops, rereading the destination article and so on. I believe that with a little work this idea could be developed into a marketable form that could generate income for the Foundation and allow it to become self pamatronizing(a word I use to avoid the gender specific connotations of patronizing). If you consider this to be a potentially viable concept I would be more than happy to participate in a discussion group concerning it's development. Sincerely Jody Fulford
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On 22/08/05, Jody Fulford jodywysteria@yahoo.com wrote:
I thought of the game while exploring the "random article" feature. I consecutively generate two random articles and attempt to navigate from one to the other using the links in the articles.
Hi, I'm sorry to have to say that you're not the first person to come up with this idea, although you're the first I've seen suggesting using "wikigames" of this sort as a source of revenue. [And I always say that seeing someone else have the same idea as you just goes to show it was indeed a good idea...]
One place this is sometimes played is in the Wikipedia IRC chatroom [1], and somebody even wrote a "six degrees of wikipedia" tool [2] to automatically find the shortest route between two pages. (That name is a further play on the common name "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" [3])
One of the interesting things is that not only is it educational, it tends to improve the content as well, since pages will tend to be copyeditted on the way past. And if players are allowed to add links *if those links are appropriate additions to the article*, it can make the wiki easier to navigate for other users too.
As for creating a revenue stream from such games, I think "six degrees" may be a little too automatable to become truly competitive [us AI boffins have spoilt the fun], but in general, "wikigames" of this sort are an interesting concept. There are more obvious ones, of course, like trivia quizzes and the like, but "treasure hunt" type ones that rely on the way Wikipedia works could be good.
And people do seem to like getting *something* for their money, even if it's just a moment of excitement, and actually means that *less* money gets through to the causes they're supporting. Look at the popularity of the UK National Lottery, for instance, which gives some money to jackpot winners and some to "good causes - the government's even planning on using scratchcards as one of the ways of raising funds for the 2012 London Olympics...
==Refs== [1] see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC [2] http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~kate/cgi-bin/six_degrees [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
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