[WikiEN-l] Future avenues of garnering participation; or, How Wikipedia is currently a crappy/crack-tastic game

[maru dubshinki]

(Warning: blue sky speculation and impratical idea-slinging follows)

So, I was watching a downloaded copy of an interesting talk sponsored
by Google (and available on Google Video, natch:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=Human+Computation
 ) called "Human Computation". It was given by [[Luis von Ahn]], and
it was largely about his ideas on [[Human-based computation]], with a
lot of attention given to [[ESP Game]] and PeekaBoom.

ESP Game, to summarize, is a quest to label images on the Web by
making describing the image the product of a game in which two players
negotiate the description.

In his talk, I think he estimated that 5000 players could label every
image on the web in about 2 months.

Now, what struck me about this (aside from the ingenuity of figuring
out a way to put human cycles to work) was how currently *pointless*
this quest was.  So Luis now has a database with descriptions of a
portion of the web's images.  He can make an alright image search
engine. Maybe sell the data to Google who could obviously make use of
it. Image search might improve a few percent (let's be optimistic). He
even admitted as much in the questions section, that the loop isn't
closed, but that it's just an "engineering perspective" (should I make
a joke about academics here?).

The essential point is that this is an instance where the famous
"Read-only Web" or Web 1.0 is a serious barrier to actually using the
gathered info on a large scale, since you can't go in and add the
devised descriptions to those images lacking them (which is useful for
among other things, screen readers). The HTML and images are static.
You can't analyse the relevant object and improve it. The source is
closed.

But we here are fans of wikis, good ol' Web 2.0, the RW web.  Why not
apply these ideas to Wikipedia? Disambiguations are one possibility;
categorization is another; image tagging or pace ESP Game,
descriptions (I know we have to have a bunch of images on en or
Commons which need descriptions; even a few disjointed words are an
improvement on nothing).  It's too bad Luis probably wouldn't want to
use Commons instead of Google's image search, since he has everything
all set up already. I mean, already we've got plenty of bots and
rather complex software specialized for various obscure tasks. Why not
a game?

I mean, critics are always saying Wikipedia is a crappy text-based
MMORPG masquerading as an encyclopedia... why not prove them wrong and
show that Wikipedia is a mediocre text-based puzzle game masquerading
as an encyclopedia? :)

~maru