[Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)

[Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis]

In order to have many articles on the same topic, you must have a way so
that the readers have those articles ranked. This way, the reader would
instantly see the article he most trusts, no more effort for the reader.

I dont know whether trust is required to be formalized for a small group of
developers working for a project, but it is necessary for a project like
Wikipedia where there are thousands of contributors.

Google found a trust metric to rank the internet. He ranked pages by having
sites trust sites(links).

We need to study and formalize a trust metric (with people trusting people )
for that kind of revolution of a distributed Wikipedia to take place.

*None of the previous proposals tried to cooperate with someone that is
working on trust metrics.*

I think that the best way to go forward is to create a distributed wikipedia
and let it be a test bed for a few trust metrics.

I am not a developer but I recently started working on creating such a trust
metric <http://opensociety.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page>.

Here is another more mature effort on the study of trust metrics.
http://www.trustlet.org/wiki

2011/7/2 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>

> On 1 July 2011 09:27, Alec Conroy <alecmconroy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 12:21 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs>
> wrote:
> >> On 07/01/2011 09:15 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>
> >>> Per HaeB's link, this is a perennial proposal. People like the idea,
> >>> but in eighteen years - back as far as the Interpedia proposal, before
> >>> wikis existed - no-one has made one that works. Why not? What's
> >>> failing to go on here?
>
> >> Per HaeB's link, IMO no proposal was specific enough, and no proposal
> >> was actually done.
>
> > I don't know why it took so long, but here's my guess.   It hasn't
> > worked for the past 18 years because prior to wikipedia, nobody ever
> > got anything like this to work.   It took a Jimmy to look at patent
> > absurdity of 'anyone can edit' encyclopedias and somehow see that it
> > was working in an amazing and world-changing way.
>
>
> The fact that Github's git-backed wikis haven't been seized upon
> suggests to me that there's no demand for a distributed wiki system
> amongst the *readers*.
>
> It's like the perennial proposal for multiple article versions on
> Wikipedia for each point of view. This solves a problem for the
> *writers*, but makes one for the *readers*. They seem to want one
> source with one article on a topic, else they'd just hit the top ten
> links in Google instead of going to Wikipedia. (Wikinfo has tried
> implementing this. Its readership is negligible compared to Wikipedia,
> but its writers enjoy it.)
>
> Why do people want ten Wikipedias to look up instead of one? They
> observably don't - they want a source they can quickly look up
> something in that they can reasonably trust to be useful. They only go
> to multiple sources if that one starts sucking.
>
> A distributed wiki proposal needs to clearly solve a problem the readers
> have.
>
> There are several such perennial proposals that are ignored because
> they are actually about solving problems for the writers, and not
> solving problems for the readers.
>
>
> - d.
>
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-- 


Sincerely yours,

     Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis