A user-friendly, up-to-date Wikipedia idea

[Unity+]

So, I began working on assignment recently, and it came to me how much information is on Wikipedia. Vast amounts of it are there and viewable by any user. However, the problem I find is there is information, but too much information. I want to find out something about a particular topic and want to see the information that relates to the question I have or simply want to satisfy curiosity.

 

Another problem is Wikipedia is not always up-to-date. It relies on people being willing to go to the article and edit with proper information.

 

Therefore, I propose a new type of Wikipedia software that solves those two major problems, in my opinion. The one idea involves using the Tumblr structures, where there are no official blogs, but blogs are are simply home for each blog post. While wikipedia does do this on some level, it does it in a way where it can get messy in what relates to what, so-to-speak.

 

To solve the second problem, I think we can go to social media to solve this problem. Social media is a fast-moving highway of information, where people display information about current events. If there were a way to get this information to be on the page it relates to, it can provide the user with a more up-to-date understanding of events.

 

What do you think of the idea? Would it become too complex?

[3blake7]

The founders and developers of Wikipedia also offer their software as a free and open-source solution developed by programmers all around the world. There are lots of extensions, addons to the MediaWiki software. The Wikipedia team is currently working on better Discussion pages with an extension called Flow and also on notifications (like Facebook) called Echo. They also have a new WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor called VisualEditor that they are developing to make it more user-friendly for people to add content without needing to know the MediaWiki syntax.

 

One of their addons is called Semantic MediaWiki which adds a semantic reasoner and Boolean searching capabilities. Wikipedia doesn't use it though. Since most of the content under Wikipedia is CC-BY copyright, you could just setup your own copy of MediaWiki, copy their ENTIRE site, legally, then build extensions for it to connect to social media like Facebook and Twitter (some already exist but they are of poor quality).

[Roamer]

Too complex, no, but you're just using structures/interfaces that are already on the web, and try to apply them to a wiki, there's a reason wiki's are structured differently then, for example, Tumblr.

 

Involving the social media might work for something more political oriëntated, but not for a wiki(and wikipedia and other wiki's are reasonably comprehensive already)

And Tumblr is more of a presentation for new/interesting things, it does not need to be as comprehensive as a wiki.

[3blake7]

Too complex, no, but you're just using structures/interfaces that are already on the web, and try to apply them to a wiki, there's a reason wiki's are structured differently then, for example, Tumblr.

 

Involving the social media might work for something more political oriëntated, but not for a wiki(and wikipedia and other wiki's are reasonably comprehensive already)

And Tumblr is more of a presentation for new/interesting things, it does not need to be as comprehensive as a wiki.

 

It wouldn't be too difficult to give users a stream presentation to a wiki, with each user have a dashboard that aggregates changes done by people they are following or pages they are watching. Then they could have their own "blog" which is an aggregate of changes they have made or changes/pages they deliberately put on their stream then integrate it into twitter and facebook to recruit new members or send updates to your facebook status. It could be a useful presentation to create like social networks of specialists that only watch pages they are interested in and have that connectivity with other social media. It could encourage more contributors and people being more active in maintaining content. MediaWiki already lets you watch pages but people would be more likely to help maintain if they had a Facebook friend who was say a college professor and the MediaWiki software was automatically posting updates of the wiki page they are watching on their Facebook stream. That college professor would be more likely to have other friends on Facebook who are experts.

 

If the OP wanted to put in the programming time, he could accomplish this using the HybridAuth open-source authentication library that supports most social media sites, then create a MediaWiki extension using it. He would probably have to create a new MediaWiki skin as well to give it the social networking appearance.

Edited July 4, 2015 by 3blake7