Hi David,
really thanks for this email.
I'm at OAI8 (conference of Open Access in Geneva), with several fellow
wikimedians,
and I'd like to express some thoughts related to yours.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 6:47 AM, David Cuenca <dacuetu(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All this led me to think about the emotional vs
rational rewards that
users (or institutions) obtain from contributing content to Wikipedia,
Commons, Wikisource, etc. Are really "active thanks", as currently
implemented, suistainable and scalable? Will all the contributors who
deserve it get a thanks some day? Could personalized view counts/ratings
reports about uploaded pictures, major contributions to WP articles, etc.
have some impact on contributor satisfaction/retention? Would "automated
personal impact reports" free collaborators from the duty of thanking one
another, or would that mean less personal interactions?
These are some questions that I leave open here.
I think this is a crucial point.
It is not new that people do things for all kinds
of motivations, that is
for all kind of "rewards".
We know that "being appreciated" is a fundamental boost in human nature,
and we have seen this in Wikimedia projects as well.
I want to connect this thing with a related issue, which is participation
of scholars (phds, professors, students, researchers, etc.).
It is my (strong) opinion that when we will find a way to track/report
detailed authorship and contributions of users in collaborative
environments, we would have scholars come to us and really collaborate.
As most of you know, the academy world is trapped in "publish-or-perish":
people need to publish articles with their name on it, because articles
(and citations of article) is the real currency in the academic world.
Scholars need to "produce", and on that production they are evaluated, and
their career depends on that.
What if scholars could report to their universities how much they
contributed in Wikipedia? How many useful comments they have written on
academic blogs? How much thought the gave in specific and high level
threads in mailing lists? (yes, I know it's a dream)
If we could create the report/feedback framework for people to collaborate
and be "commoners", we could make academic collaboration skyrocket (IMHO).
We could start thinking about this in the Wikimedia world.
==Semantic annotations ==
As you might know there is a GSoC [3] which aims to
convert the OKFN
Annotator [4] into a Mediawiki extension. That is a great project that will
enable inline comments in mediawiki projects, but it shouldn't be seen as
the end, but only an step in the direction of semantic annotations.
What could semantic annotations mean for Wikipedia? More precise answers
to questions. Instead of just having "millions of articles" there would be
the possibility of answering "trillions of questions" (or at least pointing
to the text fragment(s) that has/have the answer). This kind of paradigm
shift might need some pondering and broad community discussion.
What could semantic annotations mean for Wikisource? Text
interconectedness. Be able to relate concepts, authors, fragments... and
then be able to query those relationships.
Another dream of mine is an annotator that could save "facts" in Wikidata
statements.
We could reald a newspaper online, or a book, or an article on a scientific
blog, and highlight a short sentence, and this sentence would be a
statement (Item has a Property Value), with a source (the original
document).
I bet this is not *so* difficult.
Aubrey