Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
* Ashar Voultoiz hashar+...@free.fr [Sat, 08 Jan 2011 23:08:23 +0100]: On 01/01/11 16:06, David Gerard wrote: Because MediaWiki is very little work. And we like to be treated like heroes every now and then. MediaWiki is not a little work. Not everybody can set up a farm with it's own (not WMF's) shared repository commons (I am especially speaking of pre-instant commons era, where you had to alter many global settings). Not everybody can have a path-based farm, instead of DNS-based one. Even memorizing these wg* globals is a large work. 99% of users do not even know that one might add JS-scripts to MediaWiki namespace. There's been done everything at my primary work to undermine my MediaWiki deployment efforts - that it easily can be installed via the linux package - so why he is installing that manually, markup is primitive, inflexible, PHP is inferior language, use ASP.NET instead and so on. This is my exact experience. And I have been a hero for 4 years in my current company. Almost all department now have a MediaWiki installation and nobody complained about the lack of ACL or WYSIWTF :b BTW, there's HaloACL nowadays, although I haven't deployed it yet. Unfortunately my own experience with earning on MediaWiki is not so bright - perhaps because this is a third world country. The main issues users encountered were : - installing the parserfunction - getting the wikipedia look'n feel (just add some CSS) - single sign on (install Ryan Lane LDAP authentication) Yes, that is simple. However not everything is simple and sometimes you have to write your own extension. For example, there was no flexible poll extensions some years ago. Dmitriy ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 7:25 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov ques...@rambler.ru wrote: There's been done everything at my primary work to undermine my MediaWiki deployment efforts - that it easily can be installed via the linux package - so why he is installing that manually, markup is primitive, inflexible, PHP is inferior language, use ASP.NET instead and so on. ASP.NET? Only if you want all your sourcecode exposed. Marco -- VMSoft GbR Nabburger Str. 15 81737 München Geschäftsführer: Marco Schuster, Volker Hemmert http://vmsoft-gbr.de ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 01/01/11 16:06, David Gerard wrote: Because MediaWiki is very little work. And we like to be treated like heroes every now and then. This is my exact experience. And I have been a hero for 4 years in my current company. Almost all department now have a MediaWiki installation and nobody complained about the lack of ACL or WYSIWTF :b The main issues users encountered were : - installing the parserfunction - getting the wikipedia look'n feel (just add some CSS) - single sign on (install Ryan Lane LDAP authentication) -- Ashar Voultoiz ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Can I suggest a really simple trick to inject something new into stagnating wikipedia? Simply install Labeled Section Trasclusion into a large pedia project; don't ask, simply install it. If you'd ask, typical pedian boldness would raise a comment Thanks, we don't need such a thing for sure. They need it... but they don't know, nor they can admit that a small sister project like source uses currently something very useful. Let they discover the #lst surprising power. Alex ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2011/1/4 Alex Brollo alex.bro...@gmail.com: Simply install Labeled Section Trasclusion into a large pedia project; Just from looking at the LST code, I can tell that it has at least one performance problem: it initializes the parser on every request. This is easy to fix, so I'll fix it today. I can also imagine that there would be other performance concerns with LST preventing its deployment to large wikis, but I'm not sure of that. Roan Kattouw (Catrope) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2011/1/4 Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com Just from looking at the LST code, I can tell that it has at least one performance problem: it initializes the parser on every request. This is easy to fix, so I'll fix it today. I can also imagine that there would be other performance concerns with LST preventing its deployment to large wikis, but I'm not sure of that. Excellent, I'm a passionate user of #lst extension, and I like that its code can be optimized (so I feel combortable to use it more and more). I can't read php, and I take this opportunity to ask you: 1. is #lsth option compatible with default #lst use? 2. I can imagine that #lst simply runs as a substring finder, and I imagine that substring search is really an efficient, fast and resource-sparing server routine. Am I true? 3. when I ask for a section into a page, the same page is saved into a cache, so that next calls for other sections of the same page are fast and resource-sparing? What a creative use of #lst allows, if it is really an efficient, light routine, is to build named variables and arrays of named variables into one page; I can't imagine what a good programmer could do with such a powerful tool. I'm, as you can imagine, far from a good programmer, nevertheless I built easily routines for unbeliavable results. Perhaps, coming back to the topic. a good programmer would disrupt wikipedia using #lst? :-) Alex ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2011/1/4 Alex Brollo alex.bro...@gmail.com:
Excellent, I'm a passionate user of #lst extension, and I like that its code
can be optimized (so I feel combortable to use it more and more). I can't
read php, and I take this opportunity to ask you:
I haven't read the code in detail, and I can't really answer these
question until I have. I'll look at these later today, I have some
other things to do first.
1. is #lsth option compatible with default #lst use?
No idea what #lsth even is or does, nor what you mean by 'compatible'
in this case.
2. I can imagine that #lst simply runs as a substring finder, and I
imagine that substring search is really an efficient, fast and
resource-sparing server routine. Am I true?
It does seem to load the entire page text (wikitext I think, not sure)
and look for the section somehow, but I haven't looked at how it does
this in detail.
3. when I ask for a section into a page, the same page is saved into a
cache, so that next calls for other sections of the same page are fast and
resource-sparing?
I'm not sure whether LST is caching as much as it should. I can tell
you though that the fetch the wikitext of revision Y of page Z
operation is already cached in MW core. Whether the fetch the
wikitext of section X of revision Y of page Z operation is cached
(and whether it makes sense to do so), I don't know.
What a creative use of #lst allows, if it is really an efficient, light
routine, is to build named variables and arrays of named variables into one
page; I can't imagine what a good programmer could do with such a powerful
tool. I'm, as you can imagine, far from a good programmer, nevertheless I
built easily routines for unbeliavable results. Perhaps, coming back to the
topic. a good programmer would disrupt wikipedia using #lst? :-)
Using #lst to implement variables in wikitext sounds like a terrible
hack, similar to how using {{padleft:}} to implement string functions
in wikitext is a terrible hack.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2011/1/4 Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com
What a creative use of #lst allows, if it is really an efficient, light
routine, is to build named variables and arrays of named variables into
one
page; I can't imagine what a good programmer could do with such a
powerful
tool. I'm, as you can imagine, far from a good programmer, nevertheless I
built easily routines for unbeliavable results. Perhaps, coming back to
the
topic. a good programmer would disrupt wikipedia using #lst? :-)
Using #lst to implement variables in wikitext sounds like a terrible
hack, similar to how using {{padleft:}} to implement string functions
in wikitext is a terrible hack.
Thanks Roan, your statement sound very alarming for me; I'll open a specific
thread about into wikisource-l quoting this talk. I'm doing any efford to
avoid server/history overload, since I know that I am using a free service
(I just fixed {{loop}} template to optimize it into it.source, at my
best...) and if you are right, I've to change deeply my approach to #lst.
:-(
Alex
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 4 January 2011 16:00, Alex Brollo alex.bro...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/1/4 Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com ... What a creative use of #lst allows, if it is really an efficient, light routine, is to build named variables and arrays of named variables into one page; I can't imagine what a good programmer could do with such a powerful tool. I'm, as you can imagine, far from a good programmer, nevertheless I built easily routines for unbeliavable results. Perhaps, coming back to the topic. a good programmer would disrupt wikipedia using #lst? :-) Don't use the words good programmers, sounds like mythic creatures that never adds bugs and can work 24 hours without getting tired. Haha... What you seems you may need, is a special type of people, maybe in the academia, or student, or working already on something that already ask for a lot performance . One interested in the intricate details of optimizing. The last time I tried to search something special about PHP (how to force a garbage recollection in old versions of PHP) there was very few hits on google, or none. -- -- ℱin del ℳensaje. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Tei wrote: The last time I tried to search something special about PHP (how to force a garbage recollection in old versions of PHP) there was very few hits on google, or none. Maybe that was because PHP only has garbage recollection since 5.3 :) For reference: http://php.net/manual/features.gc.php ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Alex Brollo wrote:
Thanks Roan, your statement sound very alarming for me; I'll open a specific
thread about into wikisource-l quoting this talk. I'm doing any efford to
avoid server/history overload, since I know that I am using a free service
(I just fixed {{loop}} template to optimize it into it.source, at my
best...) and if you are right, I've to change deeply my approach to #lst.
:-(
Alex
The reason that labelled section transcluding is only enabled on
wikisources, some wiktionaries... is that it is inefficient. Thus your
proposal of enable it everywhere would be a bad idea. However, I am just
remembering things said in the past. I haven't reviewed it myself.
Do not try to be over-paranoid on not using the fetaures you have
available. You can ask for advice if something you have done is sane or
not, of course.
An interesting point is that labelled section transclusion is enabled on
French wikipedia. It's strange that someone got tricked into enabling it
on that 'big' project. I wonder how is it being used there.
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 1 January 2011 03:03, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago. They mainly cited ease of use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons. Personally I hated it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a template-hacker. The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like community and WikiProject notices and various real-time stats. If you were a vandal fighter, you would get a vandalism thermometer, streaming incident notices, a recent changes feed, etc. If you were a content reviewer, you would get lists of the latest Featured Article and Good Article candidates, as well as the latest images nominated for Featured Picture Status, and announcements from the Guild of Copyeditors. The possibilities are endless. Ryan Kaldari So, what stop people from writing a dashboard wizard that let people select a predefined one? -- -- ℱin del ℳensaje. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 1 January 2011 02:03, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago. There's a certain large media organisation in the UK that uses Confluence for WYSIWYG and access control lists. And not MediaWiki. I could have talked them past the ACLs, but not the lack of WYSIWYG. That's one of the reasons I'm so very gung-ho on the stuff. They mainly cited ease of use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons. It doesn't have ease of use at all. What it has is a features list and a sales team. In terms of ease of use, my current workplace has an official Plone-based intranet and a few less-official MediaWiki installations. Our office wiki is ridiculously easier to actually use than the Plone site, despite the lack of WYSIWYG (FCK was pretty good, but not quite good enough). The Plone site is a write-only Personally I hated it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a template-hacker. The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like community and WikiProject notices and various real-time stats. If you were a vandal fighter, you would get a vandalism thermometer, streaming incident notices, a recent changes feed, etc. If you were a content reviewer, you would get lists of the latest Featured Article and Good Article candidates, as well as the latest images nominated for Featured Picture Status, and announcements from the Guild of Copyeditors. The possibilities are endless. Ryan Kaldari On 12/31/10 4:35 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Neil Kandalgaonkarne...@wikimedia.org Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says Let's make a wiki page! Why not? That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. Oh. Well, that's bad. But people will choose the wrong tools; I don't think that's evidence that MediaWiki's Broken As Designed. Too powerful and complex to administer? It needs administration? In a small organization? I set one up at my previous employers, and used it to take all my notes, which required exactly zero administration: I just slapped it on a box, and I was done. And my successor is *very* happy about it. :-) Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 1 January 2011 15:03, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't have ease of use at all. What it has is a features list and a sales team. In terms of ease of use, my current workplace has an official Plone-based intranet and a few less-official MediaWiki installations. Our office wiki is ridiculously easier to actually use than the Plone site, despite the lack of WYSIWYG (FCK was pretty good, but not quite good enough). The Plone site is a write-only ... document graveyard. It's where documentation goes to die, unloved and unnoticed. The wiki is what people actually read and update. But I do think WYSIWYG could give it about eight times the participation. So, yeah. I'm picturing a happy world of bunnies and flowers where the MediaWiki tarball includes WYSIWYG right there and people use an office wiki as the massively multiplayer office whiteboard it should be, and the sysadmin gets treated like a hero with very little work. Because MediaWiki is very little work. And we like to be treated like heroes every now and then. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2010/12/29 Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org: One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment. The actual effect of FlaggedRevs on revert behavior appears to be, if anything, to accelerate reverts. See Felipe Ortega's presentation at Wikimania 2010, page 18 and following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Felipe_Ortega,_Flagged_revisions_study_results.pdf Performing review actions as quickly as possible is generally seen by FlaggedRevs-using communities as one of the key performance indicators connected with the feature. The moment of performing the review action also tends to be the moment of reverting. I see no evidence, on the other hand, that FlaggedRevs has contributed to a decreased sense of urgency anywhere it's been employed. It's important to note that FlaggedRevs edits aren't like patches awaiting review. They must be processed in order for anyone's subsequent edits to be reader-visible. Logged-in users, on the other hand, always see the latest version by default. These factors and others may contribute to a sense that edits must be processed as quickly as possible. I do fully agree with the rest of your note. We have sufficient data to show not only that the resistance against new edits as indicated by the revert ratio towards new users has increased significantly in the last few years, but also that only very few of the thousands of new users who complete their first 10 edits in any given month stick around. Our former contributors survey showed that among people with more than 10 edits/month who had stopped editing, 40% did so because of unpleasant experiences with other editors. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Former_contributors_survey_presentation_-_wiki.pdf While fixing the editing UI is absolutely essential, I strongly agree with your hypothesis that doing so without regard for the problematic social dynamics is likely to only accelerate people's negative experiences. Useful technology changes in the area of new user interaction are a lot harder to anticipate, however, and the only way we're going to learn is through lots of small experiments. We can follow in the footsteps of the GroupLens researchers and others who have experimented with interface changes such as changes to the revert process, and how these affect new user retention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/NICE (See their publications to-date at http://www.grouplens.org/biblio ) Once we've identified paths that are clearly fruitful (e.g. if we find that an experiment with real-time chat yields useful results), we can throw more resources at them to implement proper functionality. Over the holidays, my mother shared her own newbie biting story. She's 64 years old and a professional adult educator. Her clearly constructive good faith edit in the FlaggedRevs-using German Wikipedia [1] was reverted within the minute it was made, without a comment of any kind. She explained that she doesn't have enough frustration tolerance to deal with this kind of behavior. It's quite likely that we won't be able to make Wikipedia frustration-free enough to retain someone like my mother as an editor, but we should be able to make it a significantly more pleasant experience than it is today. [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transaktionsanalysediff=76794057oldid=75722161 -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2010/12/31 Conrad Irwin conrad.ir...@gmail.com Evolution is the best model we have for how to build something, the way to keep progress going is to continually try new things; if they fail, meh, if they succeed — yay! Just to add a little bit of pure theory into the talk, wiki project is simply one of the most interesting, and successful, models of adaptive complex systems theory. I encourage anyone to take a deeper look into it. It's both interesting for wiki users/sysops/high level managers and for complex systems researchers. I guess, complex system theory wuld suggest too politics. Just an example: as in evolution, best environment where something new appears is not the wider environment, but the small ones, the islands, just like Galapagos in evolution! This would suggest a great attention about what happens into smaller wiki projects. I guess, the most interesting things could be found there, while not so much evolution can be expected into the mammoth project. ;-) Alex (from it.source) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
masti wrote: On 12/31/2010 01:02 AM, Platonides wrote: There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach much more wiki. if you like to be blocked for blanking ... masti If it was the right way of deleting, it would actually be the way specified by the policy... if that page really deserves to be deleted. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
- Original Message - From: George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com MW was designed to build an encyclopedia with Web 1.5 technology. It was a major step forwards compared to its contemporaries, but sites like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter are massive user experience advances over where we are and can credibly go with MediaWiki. MediaWiki is nearly perfectly usable from my Blackberry with CSS, images, and JavaScript disabled; please don't break that. Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
- Original Message - From: Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says Let's make a wiki page! Why not? That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. Oh. Well, that's bad. But people will choose the wrong tools; I don't think that's evidence that MediaWiki's Broken As Designed. Too powerful and complex to administer? It needs administration? In a small organization? I set one up at my previous employers, and used it to take all my notes, which required exactly zero administration: I just slapped it on a box, and I was done. And my successor is *very* happy about it. :-) Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago. They mainly cited ease of use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons. Personally I hated it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a template-hacker. The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like community and WikiProject notices and various real-time stats. If you were a vandal fighter, you would get a vandalism thermometer, streaming incident notices, a recent changes feed, etc. If you were a content reviewer, you would get lists of the latest Featured Article and Good Article candidates, as well as the latest images nominated for Featured Picture Status, and announcements from the Guild of Copyeditors. The possibilities are endless. Ryan Kaldari On 12/31/10 4:35 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Neil Kandalgaonkarne...@wikimedia.org Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says Let's make a wiki page! Why not? That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. Oh. Well, that's bad. But people will choose the wrong tools; I don't think that's evidence that MediaWiki's Broken As Designed. Too powerful and complex to administer? It needs administration? In a small organization? I set one up at my previous employers, and used it to take all my notes, which required exactly zero administration: I just slapped it on a box, and I was done. And my successor is *very* happy about it. :-) Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
* Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org [Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:40:13 -0800]: Thanks... I know this is a provocative question but I meant it just as it was stated, nothing more, nothing less. For better or worse my history with the foundation is too short to know the answers to these questions. All the assumptions in my question are up for grabs, including the assumption that we're even primarily developing MediaWiki for WMF projects. Maybe we think it's just a good thing for the world and that's that. Anyway, I would question that it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep the core small -- it seems to me that more and more of the things we use to power the big WMF projects are being pushed into extensions and templates and difficult-to-reproduce configuration and even data entered directly into the wiki, commingled indistinguishably with documents. (As you are aware, it takes a lot of knowledge to recreate Wikipedia for a testing environment. ;) Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says Let's make a wiki page! That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. And that has a lot of downsides; no version history, complex to auth credentials, lack of formatting power, can't easily transition to a doc published on a website, etc. MediaWIki wasn't always so complex. The first version, I've used in 2007 (1.9.3) was reasonably simpler than current 1.17 / 1.18 revisions. And one might learn it gradually, step by step in many months or even years. Besides of writing extensions for various clients, I do use it for my own small memo / blog, where I do put code samples, useful links (bookmarking) and a lot of various texts (quotations and articles to read later). To me, a standalone MediaWiki on a flash drive sounds like a good idea. However, there are many limitations, although SQLite support have become much better and there is a Nanoweb http server; some computers might already listen to 127.0.0.1:80. I wish it was possible to run a kind of web server with system sockets, or even no sockets at all, however browsers probably do not support this :-( Otherwise, one should pre-run a port scanner (not a very good thing). Dmitriy ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/10 7:26 PM, Tim Starling wrote: OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing. For me the usability projects always had the unstated intent of broadening the pool of good editors. More hands to ease the burdens of the beleagured admins, and also fresher blood that wasn't quite as ensconced in wikipolitics. But overall I agree. Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, [...] This is an interesting insight! I have been thinking along these lines too, although in a more haphazard way. At some point, if we believe our community is our greatest asset, we have to think of Wikipedia as infrastructure not only for creating high quality articles, but also for generating and sustaining a high quality editing community. My sense is that the Wiki* communities are down with goal #1, but goal #2 is not on their radar at all. So we probably need an employee dedicated to this. (I think? Arguments?) When the Usability Project closed down, the team was also unhappy with the narrow focus paid to editing. Research showed the most serious problems were elsewhere. We then said we were going to address UX issues in a very broad way, which included social issues. Unfortunately the person in charge of that left the Foundation soon after and in the kerfuffle I'm not sure if we now have anybody whose primary job it is to think about the experience of the user in such broad terms. -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2010/12/30 Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org On 12/29/10 7:26 PM, Tim Starling wrote: Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, [...] This is an interesting insight! Yes it's really interesting and highlighting! I'm following another talk about StringFunctions; and I recently got an account into toolserver (I only hope that my skill is merely sufficient!). In both cases, there's an issue of security by obscurity. I hate it at beginning, but perhaps such an approach is necessary, it's the simplest way to get a very difficult result. So, what's important is, the balance between simplicity and complexity, since this turns out into a contributor filter. At the beginning, wiki markup has been designed to be very simple. A very important feature of markup has been sacrificed: the code is not well formed. There are lots of simple, but ambiguous tags (for bold and italic characters, for lists); tags don't need to be closed; text content and tags/attributes are mixed freely into the template code. This makes simpler their use but causes terrible quizzes for advanced users facing with unusual cases or trying to parse wikitext by scripts or converting wikitext into a formally well formed markup. My question is: can we imagine to move a little bit that balance accepting a little more complexity and to think to a well formed wiki markup? Alex ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org wrote: Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,? Why would I contribute to software that I can't even run? ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Tim Starling wrote: OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing. Is there any evidence to support these claims? From what I understand, a lot of Wikipedia's best new content is added by anonymous users.[1] Thousands more editors are capable of registering and editing without much interaction with the broader Wikimedia community at all. If there's evidence that mean admins are a credible threat to long-term viability, I'd be interested to see it. Given that there are about 770 active administrators[2] on the English Wikipedia and I think you could reasonably say that a good portion are not mean, is it really quite a few people who are having this far-reaching impact that you're suggesting exists? That seems unlikely. Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, then we could burn out the majority of the Internet population before we figure out what's going on. Increasing the number of new editors by a large factor will increase the anxiety level of admins, and thus accelerate this process. I think the growth should be organic. With a better interface in place, a project has a much higher likelihood of successful, healthy growth. One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment. Endless backlogs are going to draw people in? Delayed gratification is going to keep people contributing? This proposal seems anti-wiki in a literal and philosophical sense. MZMcBride [1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/abstracts/TR2007-606/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrators ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 30 December 2010 00:27, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: You could even compete by putting up a better editing interface, conceivably, although auth would be tricky to work out. You know, this is something that would be extremely easy to experiment with right now, On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Brion Vibber br...@pobox.com wrote: I think this isn't as useful a question as it might be; defining a project in terms of competing with something else leads to stagnation, not innovation. I agree. The correct strategy to take down Wikipedia would involve overcoming the network effect that locks it into its current position of dominance, and that's not something that would be useful for Wikipedia itself to do. To fend off attacks of this sort, what you'd want is to make your content harder to reuse, which we explicitly *don't* want to do. Better to ask: how can we enable more people to contribute who want to but can't be bothered? Making Wikipedia easy to mirror and fork is the best protection I can think of for the content itself. It also keeps the support structures (Foundation) and community good and honest. Comparison: People keep giving Red Hat money; Debian continues despite a prominent and successful fork (Ubuntu), and quite a bit goes back from the fork (both pull and push). - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 30 December 2010 11:06, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Tim Starling wrote: OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. Given that there are about 770 active administrators[2] on the English Wikipedia and I think you could reasonably say that a good portion are not mean, is it really quite a few people who are having this far-reaching impact that you're suggesting exists? That seems unlikely. There is some discussion of how the community and ArbCom enable grossly antisocial behaviour on internal-l at present. Admin behaviour is enforced by the ArbCom, and the AC member on internal-l has mostly been evasive. It's not clear what approach would work at this stage; it would probably have to get worse before the Foundation could reasonably step in. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 30 December 2010 09:07, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 30 December 2010 11:06, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Tim Starling wrote: OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. Given that there are about 770 active administrators[2] on the English Wikipedia and I think you could reasonably say that a good portion are not mean, is it really quite a few people who are having this far-reaching impact that you're suggesting exists? That seems unlikely. There is some discussion of how the community and ArbCom enable grossly antisocial behaviour on internal-l at present. Admin behaviour is enforced by the ArbCom, and the AC member on internal-l has mostly been evasive. It's not clear what approach would work at this stage; it would probably have to get worse before the Foundation could reasonably step in. Perhaps if communication actually took place with Arbcom itself, rather than on a list in which there is no Arbcom representative, there might be a better understanding of the concerns you have mentioned. There's no Arbcom representative on internal-L, and in fact this is something of a bone of contention. Nonetheless, I think the most useful post in this entire thread has been Tim Starling's, and I thank him for it. Risker (who is coincidentally an enwp Arbitration Committee member but is in no way an Arbcom representative on this list) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: I have been thinking along these lines too, although in a more haphazard way. At some point, if we believe our community is our greatest asset, we have to think of Wikipedia as infrastructure not only for creating high quality articles, but also for generating and sustaining a high quality editing community. My sense is that the Wiki* communities are down with goal #1, but goal #2 is not on their radar at all. So we probably need an employee dedicated to this. (I think? Arguments?) He would be quite busy (and polyglot!) to keep an eye over the community of +800 projects. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Ryan Kaldari wrote: Actually, I would implement hot articles per WikiProject. So, for example, you could see the 5 articles under WikiProject Arthropods that had been edited the most in the past week. That should scale well. In fact, I would probably redesign Wikipedia to be WikiProject-based from the ground up, rather than as an afterthought. Like when you first sign up for an account it asks you which WikiProjects you want to join, etc. and there are cool extensions for earning points and awards within WikiProjects (that don't require learning how to use templates). Ryan Kaldari Well, that's an interesting point. People ask for things like a chat per article without realising what that would mean. Grouping communication in bigger wikiproject channels could work. Although some tree-like structure would be needed to manually split / magically join depending on the amount of people there. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/30/10 10:24 AM, Platonides wrote: Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: At some point, if we believe our community is our greatest asset, we have to think of Wikipedia as infrastructure not only for creating high quality articles, but also for generating and sustaining a high quality editing community. So we probably need an employee dedicated to this. (I think? Arguments?) He would be quite busy (and polyglot!) to keep an eye over the community of +800 projects. Why is this a requirement? If you think about the sum total of user-hours spent on Wikipedia, the vast majority of them are spent in just three or four interface flows. But you're right; they can't be everywhere, so maybe there should be a guidelines page on design principles. We have WP:CIVILITY, do we have similar guidelines for software developers, on how to make it easy for the community to be civil? Frankly I don't think I'm qualified to do this. I know of a few people are brilliant at this, and who do this sort of thing for a living, but they are consultants. Fostering community on the web is generally considered a sort of black art... does anybody know of any less mystified way of dealing with the problem? -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Blog post on this topic: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2010/12/30/how-does-a-project-bite-only-the-proper-number-of-newbies/ - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/2010 2:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: Ok, first of all you need a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Let's assume it's a real business model and not that you know a few folks who have $1B burning a hole in their pocket. Let's also assume that it's a business model basic on getting a lot of traffic... Secondly, if you want to go up against 'Wikipedia as a whole', that's a very difficult problem. Wikipedia is one of the strongest sites on the internet in terms of S.E.O., not because of any nasty stuff, but because so many people link to Wikipedia articles from all over the web. Wikipedia ranks highly for many terms and that's a situation that Google Bing don't mind, since Wikipedia has something halfway decent to say about most topics... It makes search engines seem smart. To overturn Wikipedia on the conventional web, you'd really need to beat it at S.E.O. Sneaky-peet tricks won't help you that much when you're working at this scale, because if you're able to make enough phony links to challenge one of the most-linked sites on Earth, you're probably going to set off alarm bells up and down the West coast. Thus, the challenge of a two-sided market faces anybody who wants to 'beat' Wikipedia, and I think it's just too hard a nut to crack, even if you've got software that's way better and if you've got a monster marketing budget. I think there are three ways you can 'beat' Wikipedia in a smaller sense. (i) in another medium, (ii) by targeting very specific verticals, or (iii) by creating derivative products that add a very specific kind of value (that is, targeting a horizontal) In (i) I think of companies like Foursquare and Fotopedia that follow a mobile-first strategy. If mobile apps got really big and eclipsed the 'web as we know it', I can see a space for a Wikipedia successor. This could entirely bypass the S.E.O. problem, but couldn't Wikipedia fight back with a mobile app of it's own? On the other hand, this might not be so plausible: the better mobile devices do an O.K. job with 'HTML 5' and with improvements in hardware, networking and in HTML-related specifications, so there might be no real advantage in having 'an app for that'. Already people are complaining that a collection of apps on your device creates a number of 'walled gardens' that can't be searched in aggregate, and these kinds of pressures may erode the progress of apps. For (ii) I think of Wikia, which hosts things like http://mario.wikia.com/wiki/MarioWiki Stuff like this drives deletionists nuts on Wikipedia, but having a place for them to live in Wikia makes everybody happy. Here's a place where the Notability policy means that Wikipedia isn't competitive. Now, in general, Wikia is trying to do this for thousands of subjects (which might compete with Wikipedia overall) and they've had some success, but not an overwhelming amount. Speaking of notability, another direction is to make something that's more comprehensive than Wikipedia. Consider Freebase, which accepts Person records for any non-fictional person and has detailed records of millions of TV episodes, music tracks, books, etc. If Wikipedia refuses to go someplace, they create opportunities. As for (iii) you're more likely to have a complementary relationship with Wikipedia. You can take advantage of Wikipedia's success and get some income to pay for people and machines. There wouldn't be any possibility of 'replacing' Wikipedia except in a crazy long-term scenario where, say, we can convert Wikipedia into a knowledge base that can grow and update itself with limited human intervention. (Personally I think this is 10-25 years off) Anyhow, I could talk your ear off about (iii) but I'd make you sign an N.D.A. first. ;-) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
With open source software, there are people who think “that’s dumb,” there are people who think “I want to see it fixed” and there are people who think “I can do something about it.” The people at the intersection of all three power open source. A lot of people in the open source project Y will not see a problem with X, being X a huge usability problem that stop a lot of people from using Y. So what you have is a lot of people I don't see the problem with that ( realistically, a lot of people that will talk about a lot of things, and not about X ), and maybe some of the people that have problems with X that don't know how to communicate his problem, or don't care enough. Any open source project work like a club. The club work for the people that is part of the club, and does the things that the people of the club enjoy. If you like chess, you will not join the basket club, and probably the basket club will never run a chess competition. Or the chess club a basket competition. If anything, the Problem with open source, is that any change is incremental, and there's a lot of endogamy. Also user suggestions are not much better. Users often ask for things that are too hard, or incremental enhancements that will result on bloat on the long term. So really, what you may need is one person that can see the problems of the newbies, of the devs, of the people with a huge investment on the project, and make long term decisions, and have a lot of influence on the people, while working on the shadows towards that goal. -- -- ℱin del ℳensaje. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I think there are things we can do in software to help de-escalate this conflict between established editors and new editors. One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment. Another thing we could do is to improve the means of communication. Better communication often helps to de-escalate a conflict. We could replace the terrible user talk page interface with an easy-to-use real-time messaging framework. We could integrate polite template responses with the UI. And we could provide a centralised forum-like view of such messages, to encourage mediators to review and de-escalate emotion-charged conversations. We could also try to work out ways to make adminship less important. If protection, blocking, and deletion could be made less necessary and important in day-to-day editing, that would reduce the importance of admins and reduce the difference between established and new contributors. You could often make do with much softer versions of these three things, which could be given out much more liberally. For instance, to replace blocking, you could have a system whereby any reasonably established editor ( X edits/Y days) can place another editor or IP address in moderation, so that their edits have to be approved before going live, in Flagged Revs style. As with blocking, any established editor could also reverse such a block. Abuse would thus be easily reversed and fairly harmless (since the edits could go through automatically when it's lifted, barring conflicts). Sysops would only be necessary if people with established accounts abuse their rights. Likewise, most deletion doesn't really need to make anything private. Reasonably established editors could be given the right to soft-delete a page such that any other such editor could read or undelete it. This would be fine for the vast majority of deletions, like vanity pages and spam. Sysops would only have to get involved for copyright infringement, privacy issues, and so on. As for protection, we already have Flagged Revs. Lower levels of flagging should be imposable by people other than sysops, and since those largely supersede semiprotection, sysops would again only be needed to adjudicate disputes between established editors (like full-protecting an edit-warred page). Obviously, all these rights would be revocable by sysops in the event of abuse. Unfortunately, I don't think that technical solutions are going to fix the problem on enwiki. I think the only thing that will do it is if Wikimedia adopts more explicit policies about creating a friendly editing environment, and enforces them in the same vein as it does copyright policies. But that's easier said than done for a number of reasons. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/2010 10:26 PM, Tim Starling wrote: On 29/12/10 18:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. This has been done before: Wikinfo, Citizendium, etc. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. This is basically Wikia's business model. I think you need to think outside the box. I would make it more like World of Warcraft. We should incentivise people to set up wiki sweatshops in Indonesia, paying local people to grind all day, cleaning up articles, in order to build up a level 10 admin character that can then be sold for thousands of dollars on the open market. Also it should have cool graphics. OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing. Once you burn someone out, they don't come back for a long time, maybe not ever. So you introduce a downwards trend which extends over decades, until the rate at which we burn people out meets the rate at which new editors are born. Active, established editors have a battlefront mentality. They feel as if they are fighting for the survival of Wikipedia against a constant stream of newbies who don't understand or don't care about our policies. As the stream of newbies increases, they become more desperate, and resort to more desperate (and less civil) measures for controlling the flood. Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, then we could burn out the majority of the Internet population before we figure out what's going on. Increasing the number of new editors by a large factor will increase the anxiety level of admins, and thus accelerate this process. One thing that I think could help, at least on the English Wikipedia, would be to further restrict new article creation. Right now, any registered user can create a new article, and according to some statistics I gathered a few months ago[1], almost 25% of new users make their first edit creating an article. 81% of those users had their article deleted and 0.1% of them were still editing a few (6-7) months later, compared to 4% for the 19% whose articles were kept, giving a total retention rate of 1.3%. However, for the 75% of users who started by editing an existing article, the overall retention rate was 2.5%. Still a small number, but almost double the rate for the article creation route. The English Wikipedia, with 3.5 million articles, has been scraping the bottom of the notability barrel for a while. Creating a proper new article is not an especially easy task in terms of editing, yet the project practically encourages new users to do it. We're dropping new users into the deep end of the pool, then getting angry at them when they start to drown. What we should be doing instead is suggesting that users add their information to an existing article somewhere (with various tools to help them find it). And if they can't find anything remotely related in 3.5 million articles, ask themselves whether they still think its an appropriate topic. This is an area where the foundation potentially could step in to change things. Its never going to happen through the community, since there's too many people (or at least too many loud people) with a more is better mentality. (Part of the reason I gathered the stats was to prove that most new users don't start by creating an article). They'll scream and moan for a while about how we're being anti-wiki, but in the end, most probably won't really care that much. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: On 12/30/10 10:24 AM, Platonides wrote: Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: At some point, if we believe our community is our greatest asset, we have to think of Wikipedia as infrastructure not only for creating high quality articles, but also for generating and sustaining a high quality editing community. So we probably need an employee dedicated to this. (I think? Arguments?) He would be quite busy (and polyglot!) to keep an eye over the community of +800 projects. Why is this a requirement? The point is, there's no one community to watch. Most people think in enwiki, for being the biggest project, and most probably the base project of those people. But one must not forget that there are many WMF projects out there. It doesn't end in enwp. They have similar problems, but cannot be generalised either. There's a risk of contracting someone as an injerence on the project (seems the role for a facilitator, but I'd only place people that were already in the community -the otrs folks seem a good fishing pool-, if doing such thing). Plus, there's the view on how it may be perceived (WMF trying to impose its views over the community, WMF really having power on the project and thus being liable...). If you think about the sum total of user-hours spent on Wikipedia, the vast majority of them are spent in just three or four interface flows. What are you thinking about? Things such as talk page messages. There are shortcuts for those interfaces. Several gadgets/scripts provide a tab for adding a template to a page + leave a predefined message to the author talk page. That's good in a sense as the users *get* messages (eg. when listing images for deletion), they are also quite full and translated (relevant just for commons). But it also means that it's a generic message, so not as appropiate for everyone. We can make the flow faster, but we lose precision. But you're right; they can't be everywhere, so maybe there should be a guidelines page on design principles. We have WP:CIVILITY, do we have similar guidelines for software developers, on how to make it easy for the community to be civil? I'm lost here. Are you calling uncivil the developer community for this thread? You mean that WP:CIVILITY should be enforced by mediawiki? Developers should be more helopful when dealing bug reports? What do you mean? Frankly I don't think I'm qualified to do this. I know of a few people are brilliant at this, and who do this sort of thing for a living, but they are consultants. Fostering community on the web is generally considered a sort of black art... does anybody know of any less mystified way of dealing with the problem? ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Aryeh Gregor wrote: We could also try to work out ways to make adminship less important. If protection, blocking, and deletion could be made less necessary and important in day-to-day editing, that would reduce the importance of admins and reduce the difference between established and new contributors. You could often make do with much softer versions of these three things, which could be given out much more liberally. For instance, to replace blocking, you could have a system whereby any reasonably established editor ( X edits/Y days) can place another editor or IP address in moderation, so that their edits have to be approved before going live, in Flagged Revs style. As with blocking, any established editor could also reverse such a block. Abuse would thus be easily reversed and fairly harmless (since the edits could go through automatically when it's lifted, barring conflicts). Sysops would only be necessary if people with established accounts abuse their rights. Likewise, most deletion doesn't really need to make anything private. Reasonably established editors could be given the right to soft-delete a page such that any other such editor could read or undelete it. This would be fine for the vast majority of deletions, like vanity pages and spam. Sysops would only have to get involved for copyright infringement, privacy issues, and so on. As for protection, we already have Flagged Revs. Lower levels of flagging should be imposable by people other than sysops, and since those largely supersede semiprotection, sysops would again only be needed to adjudicate disputes between established editors (like full-protecting an edit-warred page). Obviously, all these rights would be revocable by sysops in the event of abuse. There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach much more wiki. We should also work on allowing more protection levels. Fixing problems with the if you can protect, you can edit anything behavior and such. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Alex wrote: One thing that I think could help, at least on the English Wikipedia, would be to further restrict new article creation. Right now, any registered user can create a new article, and according to some statistics I gathered a few months ago[1], almost 25% of new users make their first edit creating an article. 81% of those users had their article deleted and 0.1% of them were still editing a few (6-7) months later, compared to 4% for the 19% whose articles were kept, giving a total retention rate of 1.3%. However, for the 75% of users who started by editing an existing article, the overall retention rate was 2.5%. Still a small number, but almost double the rate for the article creation route. This is significant, but I'm not convinced about the reason. There is surely an attacking factor. You make them go through hoops, having to register an account, then destroy its work. It's normal that some potentially good contributors leave. But many of those are single purpose accounts which would only be interested in adding its myspace band, ever. We should support the first type users, but we don't want even its register for the second type. The English Wikipedia, with 3.5 million articles, has been scraping the bottom of the notability barrel for a while. Creating a proper new article is not an especially easy task in terms of editing, yet the project practically encourages new users to do it. We're dropping new users into the deep end of the pool, then getting angry at them when they start to drown. Completely. This mentality should be changed. What we should be doing instead is suggesting that users add their information to an existing article somewhere (with various tools to help them find it). And if they can't find anything remotely related in 3.5 million articles, ask themselves whether they still think its an appropriate topic. That's a good point, but not suitable for all topics. If I want to create an article that would have been considered relevant you shouldn't make me wander in circles. Some people shouldn't be treated as babies, while others should. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/31/2010 01:02 AM, Platonides wrote: There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach much more wiki. if you like to be blocked for blanking ... masti ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 31 December 2010 00:02, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach much more wiki. Pure wiki deletion is a perennial proposal. One problem is that there doesn't appear to be a wiki anywhere that actually uses it, or ever have been one. (I've asked for examples before - does anyone have any?) This suggests that the biggest wiki in the world might not be the greatest place to be the very first. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Looking over the thread, there are lots of good ideas. Its really important to have some plan towards cleaning up abstractions between structured data, procedures in representation, visual representation and tools for participation. But, I think its correct to identify the social aspects of the projects as more critical than purity of abstractions within wikitext. Tools, bots and scripts and clever ui components can abstract away some of the pain of the underlining platform as long as people are willing to accept a bit of abstraction leakage / lack of coverage in some areas as part of moving to something better. One area that I did not see much mention of in this thread is automated systems for reputation. Reputation systems would be useful both for user interactions and for gauging expertise within particular knowledge domains. Social capital within wikikmedia projects is presently stored in incredibly unstructured ways and has little bearing on user privileges or how the actions of others are represented to you, and how your actions are represented to others. Its presently based on traditional small scale capacities of individuals to gauge social standing within their social networks and or to read user pages. We can see automatic reputation system emerging anytime you want to share anything online be it making a small loan to trading used DVDs. Sharing information should adopt some similar principals. There has been some good work done in this area with wikitrust system ( and other user moderation / karma systems ). Tying that data into smart interface flows that reward positive social behaviour and productive contributions, should make it more fun to participate in the projects and result in more fluid higher quality information sharing. peace, --michael On 12/29/2010 01:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/30/10 3:33 PM, Platonides wrote: But you're right; they can't be everywhere, so maybe there should be a guidelines page on design principles. We have WP:CIVILITY, do we have similar guidelines for software developers, on how to make it easy for the community to be civil? I'm lost here. Are you calling uncivil the developer community for this thread? You mean that WP:CIVILITY should be enforced by mediawiki? Developers should be more helopful when dealing bug reports? What do you mean? I guess I have not been clear... I was picking up on what Tim said, that we have to work on making WP and other projects into places where people feel more welcome. Telling people to be nicer may help, but I actually think that people are more shaped by their environment. If you go from a party at a friend's warm apartment to an anonymous street your mood and receptiveness to others changes instantly. The point is to make MediaWiki more like the friend's apartment, and less like the anonymous street. If we have interfaces that make it easy for admins to be rude to new editors, they will be more rude. If we make it easy to be nice, then maybe they'll also be nicer. This isn't a radical new idea. Tim already noted that he hopes Pending Changes (nee FlaggedRevs) would help people be less brusque with one another. Polite template responses, things like that. Users are influenced by very subtle cues. Understanding how they work is a very rare ability. So I was suggesting we collect rules of thumb for people who are making interfaces. Not policies to bash each other with. -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:07 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: There is some discussion of how the community and ArbCom enable grossly antisocial behaviour on internal-l at present. Admin behaviour is enforced by the ArbCom, and the AC member on internal-l has mostly been evasive. Wtf? ArbCom members are expected to be responsive to discussions about English Wikipedia occurring on internal-l? Could you please clarify who are you're obliquely attacking here? -- John Vandenberg ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 31 December 2010 00:08, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 December 2010 00:02, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach much more wiki. Pure wiki deletion is a perennial proposal. One problem is that there doesn't appear to be a wiki anywhere that actually uses it, or ever have been one. (I've asked for examples before - does anyone have any?) This suggests that the biggest wiki in the world might not be the greatest place to be the very first. If you want to being the biggest wiki in the world to mean anything, you need to innovate. Wikipedia will continue to stagnate if everyone is too scared to try out new stuff. This is in my mind the biggest problem facing Wikimedia — it's suffering from complete feature-freeze because everyone is so scared of making a mistake. On all fronts, encyclopedic, social, technical, nothing has really moved forward at all for the last year or two. Sure, we've optimized a few workflows, tightened a few procedures, and added some content — but there's no innovation, nothing exciting and new. Evolution is the best model we have for how to build something, the way to keep progress going is to continually try new things; if they fail, meh, if they succeed — yay! There are no planning meetings, no months of deliberation about exactly what shape a finger should be. Sure, nothing built by evolution is perfect, but that's fine, it will continue to get better in ways not even imaginable from this point in time (everyone knows you can't see into the future, so stop wasting time trying). One reason that wikis are such a good way of creating content is that they use the same process — anyone can make a random change. If it is good, it is kept; if not it isn't. The same model is appearing in other places too. Github allows random people to change software, and only the good stuff gets merged. Google does the same: Wave was a fun idea, it turns out it was also useless — oh well, lesson learnt, move on. There is no Wikipedia-killer in a concrete sense. The world will continue to evolve. Wikipedia has a simple choice: evolve or get left behind. Conrad ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. [quote] The Viable alternative to Wikipedia isn't going to be another Mediawiki site, in any event - it's going to be something that someone puts some real effort into developing the software for, not to mention the user experience... [/quote] http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=31808view=findpostp=262671 I largely agree with that. You can't make more than broad generalizations about what a Wikipedia killer would be. If there were a concrete answer or set of answers, Wikipedia would be dead already. A number of organizations and companies have tried to replicate Wikipedia's success (e.g. Wikia) with varying degrees of success. The most common factor to past Wikipedia competitors has been MediaWiki (though if someone can refute this, please do). To me (and others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is. As for follow-up questions, be explicit. MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2010/12/29 MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. It's simply evolution rule! The day this would happen - that something will appear, collecting all the best from wiki, adding too something better and successful - wiki will slowly disappear. But all the better of wiki will survive into the emerging species where's the problem, you you don't consider wiki in terms of competition, but in terms of utiliy? I'm actively working for wiki principles, not at all for wiki project! I hope, that this will be not considered offensive for wiki community. Alex ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 29 December 2010 08:24, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: To me (and others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is. MediaWiki is precisely that software. And there's any number of specialist wikis using it that are basically Wikipedia in a specialist area. This sounds like software that looks to me on the surface like it was actually built for making an encyclopedia. This is, of course, not at all the same as success. Note the number of competitors, forks and comolements that have already beached having assumed I can do a better Wikipedia if it fits my idea of how an encyclopedia *should* look and been dead wrong. You're reasoning from the assumption of no knowledge, rather than one of considerable knowledge. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
David Gerard wrote:
On 29 December 2010 08:24, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
To me (and
others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some
software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the
jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is.
MediaWiki is precisely that software. And there's any number of
specialist wikis using it that are basically Wikipedia in a specialist
area.
No, I don't think MediaWiki is precisely that software. MediaWiki is a wiki
engine that can be used for a variety of purposes. It may have started out
as a tool to make an encyclopedia, but very shortly after its mission
drifted.
Since Wikipedia's creation, there have been countless debates about what an
encyclopedia is. However, at a most basic level, we can say that an
encyclopedia is its content. As an exercise, try retrieving the first
sentence of every article on the English Wikipedia. You'll quickly discover
it's a real pain in the ass. Or try extracting the birth year from every
living person's article on the English Wikipedia that uses an infobox. Even
more of a difficult task, if not an impossible one.
MediaWiki was designed to fit a number of ideas: free dictionary, free
encyclopedia, free news site, free media repo, etc. And thus its design has
been held back in many areas in order to ensure that any change doesn't
break its various use-cases.
How do you build a better Wikipedia? By building software designed to make
an encyclopedia. That leaves two options: abandon MediaWiki or re-focus
MediaWiki. The current MediaWiki will never lead to a Wikipedia killer. I
firmly believe that.
Assuming you focused on only building a better encyclopedia, a MediaWiki 2.0
would put meta-content in a separate area, so that clicking edit doesn't
stab the user in the eye with nasty infobox content. MW2.0 would use actual
input forms for data, instead of the completely hackish hellhole that is
[[Category:]] and {{Infobox |param}}. MW2.0 would standardize and
normalize template parameters to something more sane and would allow
categories to be added, removed, and moved without divine intervention (and
a working knowledge of Python). MW2.0 would have the ability to edit pages
without knowing an esoteric, confusing, and non-standardized markup.
All of this (and much more) is possible, but it requires killing the
one-size-fits-all model that allows MediaWiki to work (ehhh, function) as a
dictionary, media repository, news site, etc. For an encyclopedia, you want
to use categories and make a category interface as nice as possible, for
example. For a media repository, the categories are in[s]ane and would be
replaced by tags. And we won't begin to discuss the changes needed to make
Wiktionary not the scrambled, hacked-up mess that it currently is.
You make a Wikipedia killer by building software that's actually designed
to kill Wikipedia, not kill Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons,
Wikinews, and whatever else.
This sounds like software that looks to me on the surface like it was
actually built for making an encyclopedia. This is, of course, not at
all the same as success.
I'm not sure what this is. Can you clarify?
MZMcBride
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
2010-12-29 08:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? If you wouldn't have such money (mostly to pay users for creating content), then the most problematic part would be to convince community you are OK. IMHO this has nothing to do with usability or any such thing it's rather a matter of gaining trust. A part from that you would have to make all (or almost all) the things that work now work. If you would make a brand new software then you would have to rewrite at least most popular user scripts which would alone be a lot work. You would probably also have to make a nice WYSIWYG to make your site worth moving to. To make it worth to change at least some of user habits. Not to mention your site would need to build on a quikcly scalable infrastructure to guarantee high availabilty (at least as high as Wikipedia is). In general, you have to remember that even if something is technically better it's not guaranteed to be successful. For example I think that DP (pgdp.net) and Rastko are technically better equiped for proofreading then Wikisource, but I guess for thoose already familiar with MediaWiki it's easier to create texts for Wikisource. Regards, Nux. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 29 December 2010 11:21, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: David Gerard wrote: MediaWiki is precisely that software. And there's any number of specialist wikis using it that are basically Wikipedia in a specialist area. No, I don't think MediaWiki is precisely that software. MediaWiki is a wiki engine that can be used for a variety of purposes. It may have started out as a tool to make an encyclopedia, but very shortly after its mission drifted. MediaWiki was designed to fit a number of ideas: free dictionary, free encyclopedia, free news site, free media repo, etc. And thus its design has been held back in many areas in order to ensure that any change doesn't break its various use-cases. No, it's pretty much a simple free-encyclopedia engine. Ask people on the other projects about how hard it is to get anyone interested in what they need. This sounds like software that looks to me on the surface like it was actually built for making an encyclopedia. This is, of course, not at all the same as success. I'm not sure what this is. Can you clarify? Your original statement of what you thought was needed. I'm not convinced that putting more policy into the engine will make a Wikipedia killer. There's already rather a lot of encyclopedia-directed policy in the WMF deploy. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jaros e...@wp.pl wrote: If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current bottleneck is money. To break stuff you need to find community consensus, developer consensus, somebody willing to implement it and somebody to review it. Of course for a gazillion dollars you could perhaps the eliminate a few of these steps, but in general they are not really easy to solve with money I think. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Bryan Tong Minh (2010-12-29 13:05): On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jarose...@wp.pl wrote: If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current bottleneck is money. To break stuff you need to find community consensus, developer consensus, somebody willing to implement it and somebody to review it. Of course for a gazillion dollars you could perhaps the eliminate a few of these steps, but in general they are not really easy to solve with money I think. Well if you would pay users for editing you could attract more users (at least those that are not willing to work for free). But I guess that would only work if you would have practically unlimited resources... Having said that I just remembered that Youtube works like that - you can get money if get a lot of viewers on your movies. Regards, Nux. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/2010 7:05 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jaros e...@wp.pl wrote: If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current bottleneck is money. To break stuff you need to find community consensus, developer consensus, somebody willing to implement it and somebody to review it. Of course for a gazillion dollars you could perhaps the eliminate a few of these steps, but in general they are not really easy to solve with money I think. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving the Wikipedia user experience is the requirement that the content has to not only be reusable, but reusable with a minimum amount of effort - i.e. on a free shared hosting environment with neither shell access nor the ability to install or compile programs. With only a couple exceptions[1] any software that's required to display Wikipedia content has to be PHP, have a PHP implementation available, or be done client-side (and of course, we can't use Flash). We're hamstrung by the limitations of what can be reasonably done in pure PHP even in cases when we would be using a C extension or shelling out to an executable. The recently revived discussion on StringFunctions is a good example of this. Tim and others don't want to install StringFunctions because it will just increase the complexity of wikitext and, like ParserFunctions, will only be a temporary fix until template coders write new templates that reach new limits created. A real solution to the issue is to use a real programming language in place of wikitext for complex templates. But until the aforementioned limitation is relaxed, that's likely never going to happen. We have to either implement an existing language like Lua in PHP or write our own language and maintain 2 implementations of it (the compiled version for WMF and the pure PHP version). [1] LaTeX and EasyTimeline -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/2010 08:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: This is a foolish discussion for two reasons. First, wikitech-l is a technical list, and not suited for talk on organizational change. Second, innovation doesn't come from within. Encyclopaedia Britannica didn't invent Wikipedia, ATT didn't invent the Internet, Gorbachev didn't succeed in implementing competition within the communist party (although he tried), and dinosaurs weren't invited to the design committee for the surviving mammals. If there is a new alternative to Wikipedia, we, the subscribers to wikitech-l, are not invited to design it. What we can easily achieve is to make bureaucracy so slow and rigid (and our discussions derailed, like now) that more people will leave WMF projects. But this is not enough to create a working alternative. -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org wrote: Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. I'll start off by saying that I have no idea how anyone would do it, realistically. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but I think a big reason that it hasn't happened yet is because the economics of creating a competitor are really difficult. There are very few markets that Microsoft completely gave up in (especially markets in which they've had success), but yet that's exactly what they did with Encarta. Good luck getting VC money to take on a market that Microsoft abandons. ;-) I suspect if I had to choose, though, I'd go with #2. I'd probably bootstrap by creating tools *for* Wikipedia editors rather than trying right off the bat to create a wholly separate site. For example, it'd probably be possible to scrape our data to create a really fantastic citation database, which then could be used to build tools that make creating citations much easier. The goal would be to make it easier for editors to keep *my* database up-to-date, and push a copy to Wikipedia, rather than having to constantly suck things out of Wikipedia. That's such a small part of the overall editing problem that I'm not sure how I'd bootstrap that into something much larger (and in the case of a citation database, it wouldn't be necessary for Wikipedia to lose in order to have a modest ad-supported business). As to the implied question, I think we need to figure out ways of making things like this easier for third parties to tackle. If we can make it easier for third parties to create tools for editing Wikipedia (regardless of their motivations), we'll probably accidentally make it easier for us to make it easier to edit Wikipedia. Rob ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/10 4:05 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jarose...@wp.pl wrote: If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current bottleneck is money. I apologize for sending this discussion in a direction I hadn't intended. The money was purely to imply that you had to be motivated, not that you had a vast budget. Let me be more explicit. The innovator's dilemma problem, already referred to in this discussion, occurs because the successful innovator can't see past the goal of defending their earlier successes, and working with their existing assets. The thought experiment of working for a competitor was meant to suggest this: what would you do if you wanted to make Wikipedia's earlier successes *obsolete*? The point is to then try to look at some of our greatest assets and see if, in the current environment, they could be potential liabilities. And the followup question was if a competitor can do this, why don't WE do this? Brion already suggested something like this, where we would end up with a transition regime between old and new. P.S. All due respect to RobLa, but Microsoft tried this and failed doesn't exactly convince me it's impossible. ;) -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/10 3:21 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 29 December 2010 08:24, MZMcBridez...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
To me (and
others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some
software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the
jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is.
MediaWiki is precisely that software. And there's any number of
specialist wikis using it that are basically Wikipedia in a specialist
area.
No, I don't think MediaWiki is precisely that software. MediaWiki is a wiki
engine that can be used for a variety of purposes. It may have started out
as a tool to make an encyclopedia, but very shortly after its mission
drifted.
I agree. If MediaWiki is software for creating an encyclopedia then why
are the tools for creating references and footnotes optional extras?
It's rather difficult to set up MediaWiki so that it works in a manner
similar to Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons (and I know this from experience).
Scale matters too. Right now, any new feature for MediaWiki has to be
considered in the light of some tiny organization running it on an aging
Windows PC, as well as running a top ten website. It's amazing that
MediaWiki has managed to bridge this gap at all, but it's come at a
noticeable cost.
Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for
Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the
Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki
friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions
from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,?
MW2.0 would use actual
input forms for data, instead of the completely hackish hellhole that is
[[Category:]] and {{Infobox |param}}. MW2.0 would standardize and
normalize template parameters to something more sane and would allow
categories to be added, removed, and moved without divine intervention (and
a working knowledge of Python). MW2.0 would have the ability to edit pages
without knowing an esoteric, confusing, and non-standardized markup.
+1
I think it is vital to keep templates -- it's a whole new layer of
creativity and MediaWiki's shown that many powerful features can come
about that way. That said, we also want a template to have some
guaranteee of sane inputs and outputs, and maybe a template could also
suggest how its data should be indexed in search engines or for internal
search, or how to create a friendly GUI interface. Perhaps that would be
impossible for all cases, but if XML made it easy in 95% of cases, I'd
take that tradeoff.
As a programmer I am somewhat dismayed at the atrocities that have been
perpetrated with MediaWiki. (Wikimedia's hacking language variants to
show licensing options is my favorite). As someone who believes that
given freedom, users will create amazing things, I'm blown away by the
creativity. I think those show the need for a *more* powerful template
system, that is hopefully easier to use.
Maybe this is anathema here, but XML seems like a logical choice to me.
While inefficient to type in raw code, it is widely understood, and we
can use existing tools to make WYSIWYG editors easily. So perhaps an
infobox could be edited with a sort of form that was autogenerated from
some metadata that described the possible contents of an infobox.
Also, XML can encapsulate data and even other templates to an infinite
degree. A few months ago somebody asked how they could implement a third
layer of quoting in the geocoding template syntax and it just seemed
to me like this problem shouldn't have to exist.
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
And the followup question was if a competitor can do this, why don't WE do this? Now you're talking. Being static because a competitor might be able to adopt your changes better than you can is ultimately self-defeating. Fred ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,? As someone who originally started contributing from maintaining a small MediaWiki instance, I kind of dislike this question. I also don't think we should be mixing we when discussing WMF and MediaWiki. But to answer your question: yes. We get contributions, we get employees, and we get a larger, more vibrant community. A number of contributors come from enterprises and small shops, but they often don't contribute directly to Wikimedia projects. However, their contributions often allow other people to use the software in environments they couldn't be used in otherwise (LDAP authentication is a perfect example of this). The people who then get to use the software may turn into contributors that do benefit WMF. MediaWiki is created primarily for WMF use, but a lot of other people depend on it. I advocate the use of the software by everyone, and emphasize in talks that we want contributions from everyone, even if they don't benefit WMF. I don't think we should discourage this. We should really try harder to embrace enterprise users to get *more* non-WMF specific extensions and features. It doesn't take that much effort to keep core small, and maintain extensions for WMF use. I honestly don't think this is a limiting factor to the usability of WMF projects, either. Respectfully, Ryan Lane ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Ryan Lane rlan...@gmail.com wrote: As someone who originally started contributing from maintaining a small MediaWiki instance, I kind of dislike this question. I also don't think we should be mixing we when discussing WMF and MediaWiki. But to answer your question: yes. We get contributions, we get employees, and we get a larger, more vibrant community. A number of contributors come from enterprises and small shops, but they often don't contribute directly to Wikimedia projects. However, their contributions often allow other people to use the software in environments they couldn't be used in otherwise (LDAP authentication is a perfect example of this). The people who then get to use the software may turn into contributors that do benefit WMF. QFT. -Chad ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,? Not generally, no. MediaWiki is just one of Wikimedia's projects, something that I think is sometimes overlooked or forgotten. Probably as it's the current base upon which all the other projects are built. To me, that appears to be the fundamental problem here. I've said this in a roundabout way a few times now, but the horse is still whimpering, so let's try once more. I don't think the software that a dictionary or quote database needs is ever going to be the same as the software that an encyclopedia or news site needs. And I don't think the software options that fit those four use-cases will ever work (well!) for a media repository. I don't think it's a lack of creativity. Given the hacks put in place on sites like the English Wiktionary, it's clearly not. But at some point there has to be a recognition that using a screwdriver to put nails in the wall is a bad idea. You need a hammer. Tim wrote a blog on techblog.wikimedia.org in July 2010 about MediaWiki version statistics. Someone commented that it was ironic that Wikimedia was using WordPress instead of MediaWiki as a blogging platform. Tim's response: they do different things.[1] This isn't a matter of not knowing what the problem is. The problem is recognized by the leading MediaWiki developers and it's an old software principle (cf. Unix's philosophy[2] of doing one thing and doing it well). The full phrase quoted earlier is jack of all trades, master of none. I think MediaWiki fits this perfectly. MediaWiki needs to re-focus or fork. Ultimately, however, there are not enough resources to maintain every current Wikimedia project and nobody is willing to make the necessary cuts. So we end up with a lot of mediocre projects/products rather than one or two great ones. MZMcBride [1] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/?p=970#comment-819 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 2:26 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 December 2010 08:24, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: To me (and others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is. MediaWiki is precisely that software. However - see also the other threads on other lists recently, about MW core failings. MW was designed to build an encyclopedia with Web 1.5 technology. It was a major step forwards compared to its contemporaries, but sites like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter are massive user experience advances over where we are and can credibly go with MediaWiki. So, to modify David's comment - MediaWiki *was* precisely that software. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Thanks... I know this is a provocative question but I meant it just as it was stated, nothing more, nothing less. For better or worse my history with the foundation is too short to know the answers to these questions. All the assumptions in my question are up for grabs, including the assumption that we're even primarily developing MediaWiki for WMF projects. Maybe we think it's just a good thing for the world and that's that. Anyway, I would question that it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep the core small -- it seems to me that more and more of the things we use to power the big WMF projects are being pushed into extensions and templates and difficult-to-reproduce configuration and even data entered directly into the wiki, commingled indistinguishably with documents. (As you are aware, it takes a lot of knowledge to recreate Wikipedia for a testing environment. ;) Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says Let's make a wiki page! That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. And that has a lot of downsides; no version history, complex to auth credentials, lack of formatting power, can't easily transition to a doc published on a website, etc. I'm not saying MediaWiki has to be the weapon of choice for lightweight collaboration. Maybe that suggests maybe we should narrow the focus of what we're doing. Or, get more serious about going after those use cases. On 12/29/10 1:55 PM, Ryan Lane wrote: Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,? As someone who originally started contributing from maintaining a small MediaWiki instance, I kind of dislike this question. I also don't think we should be mixing we when discussing WMF and MediaWiki. But to answer your question: yes. We get contributions, we get employees, and we get a larger, more vibrant community. A number of contributors come from enterprises and small shops, but they often don't contribute directly to Wikimedia projects. However, their contributions often allow other people to use the software in environments they couldn't be used in otherwise (LDAP authentication is a perfect example of this). The people who then get to use the software may turn into contributors that do benefit WMF. MediaWiki is created primarily for WMF use, but a lot of other people depend on it. I advocate the use of the software by everyone, and emphasize in talks that we want contributions from everyone, even if they don't benefit WMF. I don't think we should discourage this. We should really try harder to embrace enterprise users to get *more* non-WMF specific extensions and features. It doesn't take that much effort to keep core small, and maintain extensions for WMF use. I honestly don't think this is a limiting factor to the usability of WMF projects, either. Respectfully, Ryan Lane ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 12/29/2010 5:14 PM, MZMcBride wrote: Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,? Not generally, no. MediaWiki is just one of Wikimedia's projects, something that I think is sometimes overlooked or forgotten. Probably as it's the current base upon which all the other projects are built. To me, that appears to be the fundamental problem here. I've said this in a roundabout way a few times now, but the horse is still whimpering, so let's try once more. I don't think the software that a dictionary or quote database needs is ever going to be the same as the software that an encyclopedia or news site needs. And I don't think the software options that fit those four use-cases will ever work (well!) for a media repository. I don't think it's a lack of creativity. Given the hacks put in place on sites like the English Wiktionary, it's clearly not. But at some point there has to be a recognition that using a screwdriver to put nails in the wall is a bad idea. You need a hammer. Tim wrote a blog on techblog.wikimedia.org in July 2010 about MediaWiki version statistics. Someone commented that it was ironic that Wikimedia was using WordPress instead of MediaWiki as a blogging platform. Tim's response: they do different things.[1] This isn't a matter of not knowing what the problem is. The problem is recognized by the leading MediaWiki developers and it's an old software principle (cf. Unix's philosophy[2] of doing one thing and doing it well). The full phrase quoted earlier is jack of all trades, master of none. I think MediaWiki fits this perfectly. I don't think using a general purpose wiki engine for every project is inherently a poor idea. MediaWiki is highly extensible. We just, for some reason, haven't really taken advantage of that where it could really matter. Most of the extensions we use just kind of work in the background. I don't know if its due to lack of resources, or whether the WMF wants all the projects to look and work the same. Wiktionary is probably the easiest example. All of the entries follow a fairly rigid layout that lends itself rather easily to a form, yet we're still inputting them using a single big textarea. Though that's not to say we couldn't still do better than we are with a general purpose wiki engine. I still stand by my earlier suggestion that we drop the requirement that everything WMF uses has to be able to work for others right out of the box using only PHP. We should use PHP when possible, but it shouldn't be a limitation. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Of course, you have to remember that Wikipedia is a top 10 website. Wikia is a top 200 website. hot articles just don't scale that well to a wiki like Wikipedia. It's fundamentally flawed. On the flip side, an Etherpad-like feature would be nice. -X! On Dec 29, 2010, at 6:41 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: I would steal some of the better ideas from Wikia like the hot article lists, user polls, user avatars, and throw in some real-time collaboration software a la Etherpad. Ryan Kaldari On 12/28/10 11:31 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Dec 28, 2010 11:31 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org wrote: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you I think this isn't as useful a question as it might be; defining a project in terms of competing with something else leads to stagnation, not innovation. A better question might be: what would be a project that would help people involving freely distributable and modifiable educational and reference materials, that you could create with today and tomorrow's tech and sufficient resources, that doesn't exist or work well today? -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Neil Kandalgaonkar (2010-12-29 21:40): On 12/29/10 4:05 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jarose...@wp.pl wrote: If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current bottleneck is money. I apologize for sending this discussion in a direction I hadn't intended. The money was purely to imply that you had to be motivated, not that you had a vast budget. Let me be more explicit. The innovator's dilemma problem, already referred to in this discussion, occurs because the successful innovator can't see past the goal of defending their earlier successes, and working with their existing assets. The thought experiment of working for a competitor was meant to suggest this: what would you do if you wanted to make Wikipedia's earlier successes *obsolete*? The point is to then try to look at some of our greatest assets and see if, in the current environment, they could be potential liabilities. My original point was that the community is the power of WMF sites and that this alone is IMHO hard to beat. To be more exact this is a community that I believe is loyal and needs to trust the corporation/founder/foundation behind the site (I've seen a community driven project fall after loosing this trust). And the followup question was if a competitor can do this, why don't WE do this? We don't because it would probably be more reasonable for our competitor to do something completely different to gather different community or he would have to make a gigantic effort to steal current community (both in technical and PR terms). I think the effort would simply be inefficient. In any case - the next killer functionality (if that's what you're asking) is well known and already mentioned - WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG that makes edits easy for new users and make them not break existing markup. And yes I believe present markup needs to be preserved. Not because it's good, it's because it is well know to many current users. It's because community is accustomed with it. Loosing users after changing markup drastically would certainly not be a good idea. You have to remember how many disappointment brought a simple change of default skin. Something that can be changed back in 3 clicks. And so new markup (if such would be used) would have to at least be parseable back to wikitext. Regards, Nux. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 2:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org wrote: In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? By having content that's consistently better. It doesn't matter how easy your site is to edit. Even if your site is so easy to edit that you get 10% of viewers editing, 10% of your few million (at best) viewers is still going to get you vastly worse content than a small fraction of a percent of Wikipedia's billions. Wikipedia survives off network effects; it's not even remotely a level playing field. People who are focusing on things like WYSIWYG or better-quality editing software are missing the point. You need to have better *content* to attract viewers, before you even stand a chance of edits through your site being meaningful. If you somehow manage to have content that's consistently better than Wikipedia's, though, people will figure out over time, as long as you can maintain the quality advantage. One obvious strategy would be to mirror Wikipedia in real time and send viewers to Wikipedia proper to edit it, but to have more useful features or a better experience. Maybe a better mobile site, maybe faster page load times, maybe easier navigation or search. Maybe more content, letting people put up vanity bios or articles about obscure webcomics that integrate more or less seamlessly with the Wikipedia corpus. You could even compete by putting up a better editing interface, conceivably, although auth would be tricky to work out. If you ever got a majority of viewers coming to your site, you could fork transparently. On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Brion Vibber br...@pobox.com wrote: I think this isn't as useful a question as it might be; defining a project in terms of competing with something else leads to stagnation, not innovation. I agree. The correct strategy to take down Wikipedia would involve overcoming the network effect that locks it into its current position of dominance, and that's not something that would be useful for Wikipedia itself to do. To fend off attacks of this sort, what you'd want is to make your content harder to reuse, which we explicitly *don't* want to do. Better to ask: how can we enable more people to contribute who want to but can't be bothered? ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
Actually, I would implement hot articles per WikiProject. So, for example, you could see the 5 articles under WikiProject Arthropods that had been edited the most in the past week. That should scale well. In fact, I would probably redesign Wikipedia to be WikiProject-based from the ground up, rather than as an afterthought. Like when you first sign up for an account it asks you which WikiProjects you want to join, etc. and there are cool extensions for earning points and awards within WikiProjects (that don't require learning how to use templates). Ryan Kaldari On 12/29/10 3:49 PM, Soxred93 wrote: Of course, you have to remember that Wikipedia is a top 10 website. Wikia is a top 200 website. hot articles just don't scale that well to a wiki like Wikipedia. It's fundamentally flawed. On the flip side, an Etherpad-like feature would be nice. -X! On Dec 29, 2010, at 6:41 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: I would steal some of the better ideas from Wikia like the hot article lists, user polls, user avatars, and throw in some real-time collaboration software a la Etherpad. Ryan Kaldari On 12/28/10 11:31 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
In dotCommunist Ew Ork, Aris, and Ome, Wikipedia disrupts you! Suggestion: Set the sights a little higher, and I'd say start by ditching the disruption metaphor, which is fine and good for firms, but less sensible in a landscape that's already massively and organically distributed (I'm thinking of the free culture movement as a whole). If the rhetorical question is how to build a better encyclopedia? or how to further the WMF's mission? -- here's something: how about some specific and well-thought out proposals and a way to discuss them that doesn't devolve to some sort of punditry pissing contest? Like, a UserVoice-style feedback system (instead of this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla#Requesting_a_feature) and clear way to keep track of project and subproject progress (Redmine?), including a way to make sense of the priorities and other trends that govern progress on the current set of open bugs (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=status%3Aopen). In real simple terms, know thyself! ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
On 29/12/10 18:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. This has been done before: Wikinfo, Citizendium, etc. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. This is basically Wikia's business model. I think you need to think outside the box. I would make it more like World of Warcraft. We should incentivise people to set up wiki sweatshops in Indonesia, paying local people to grind all day, cleaning up articles, in order to build up a level 10 admin character that can then be sold for thousands of dollars on the open market. Also it should have cool graphics. OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing. Once you burn someone out, they don't come back for a long time, maybe not ever. So you introduce a downwards trend which extends over decades, until the rate at which we burn people out meets the rate at which new editors are born. Active, established editors have a battlefront mentality. They feel as if they are fighting for the survival of Wikipedia against a constant stream of newbies who don't understand or don't care about our policies. As the stream of newbies increases, they become more desperate, and resort to more desperate (and less civil) measures for controlling the flood. Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, then we could burn out the majority of the Internet population before we figure out what's going on. Increasing the number of new editors by a large factor will increase the anxiety level of admins, and thus accelerate this process. I think there are things we can do in software to help de-escalate this conflict between established editors and new editors. One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment. Another thing we could do is to improve the means of communication. Better communication often helps to de-escalate a conflict. We could replace the terrible user talk page interface with an easy-to-use real-time messaging framework. We could integrate polite template responses with the UI. And we could provide a centralised forum-like view of such messages, to encourage mediators to review and de-escalate emotion-charged conversations. -- Tim Starling ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] How would you disrupt Wikipedia?
I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on your content. 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people and can guess what it is. -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ne...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
