I am really so glad to see your post, Mingli. I hope you are well :--) Yes, this idea of observability is great. RecentChanges was a real strength of early wikis. Now we have so much metadata about pages and edits, we could cluster results in a more meaningful way...
Also: what other ideas from the early development of collaborative tools are useful to revisit? Perhaps we can get some of the early c2 folks to come join this thread. - filtering up information to the 'top' view on a page. (timestamps of last changes, or the list of editors, or annotations visible directly on the page you are reading) - rich collapsible outline views (readable, with thumbnails and topic sentences, and multiple collapse levels; not separated into a redundant TOC) + Hackpad does a very little bit of this - barnraisings for new projects, explicit places to interconnect two wikis with different communities (that might otherwise not communicate) + One parallel today: making use of our banners to share messages to every one reading or editing a specific category, to let them know about something happening elsewhere 'in that category' Sam On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Mingli Yuan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, folks, > > Recently Lila had talk about #1 challenge in this mail-list which is > related to participation. I want to recall Ward Cunningham's idea > of observability in the very early days of wiki invention to address the > possibility to enhance participation of Wikipedia today. > > If you visit the early page of c2.com, you will find the idea > of observability is one pillar principle of wiki software, and just follow > the idea, Ward invent the RecentChanges for all wikis. > > At that time c2 is very small; now Wikipedia is so big. The original idea > of RecentChanges is not very effective today. We had made some extension > for the original idea in our mediawiki software, but I think the step is > too small. > > Let's first take a look of what we had already invented are similar to > RecentChanges but more effective: > > * Wikizine or Signpost: community stories every week > * some part of a Portal: recent changes under a subject compiled by human > > Still possible for other kind of RecentChanges which is not invented yet, > for example: > * References and external links are very valuable resources, why not > extract them from articles and compile them into a timeline? > > Content is only one aspect to observe, people are another: > * Who are the experts on some topics? > * Who are my buddies on some articles? > * Who did help me to improve an article originally I wrote? > > In all, we may reshape our technical infrastructure in this direction for > new spaces of participation. And finally, one open question for the system > designer: > > * Towards better content and community, what is the most important things > we want our user to observe? > > Regards, > Mingli > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> -- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
