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

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/12/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

I think there's definitely scope for something like that there. I
recently saw a demo of this website "Facebook", a socialising tool for
US college students and was blown away by how information-rich it was,
and how many endless opportunities there were for users to just "add
information". One person would label an image with 3 names, and 2
blanks, someone else could correct one of the 3, and add 2 more etc.
People could constantly find friends that they had in common with
others etc, and the wealth of information there was amazing.

Granted, an encyclopaedia isn't quite as exciting as building a social
network, but a lot of people (like me) enjoy the basic process of
categorising, organising, structuring and so forth. If we could come
up with some fun tools to make this easier (like Catscan, but
integrated into Wikipedia, and made even faster and more powerful),
there could be a lot of benefit.

How would you make it a game, though? Do you have any ideas? Can we
adapt kittenfight.com? :)

Steve