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Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

infinithree.org

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Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#31

Post by bambax »

Isn't Google the answer to deletionism?

Why should and and all content be stored in a special place called "wikipedia" or some other name, when you can write anything you want about any subject on your blog and have it indexed by a central search engine?

Wikipedia offers two things that lone blog posts don't: collaborative editing and "findability" (SEO).

Findability should be the problem of search engines; the fact that we need to go to Wikipedia (or IMDB...) to find specific information is a testament to Google's imperfection.

If you want to publish "a 10,000 words biography of [your] cat", you should do so on your blog, and that should be easy to find when searching for "hugh3's cat" (but not when searching for "cats", unless you're some modern-day Montaigne who can teach us eternal truths about cats just by speaking about his own).

I would even argue that Wikipedia hurts findability to some extent, since it relies on anonymous editing, and reputation builds on identity. Knowing who wrote what is a very useful piece of information (something Quora is addressing).

What about collaborative editing? Successful collaborative editing is made of two parts: software and a community. The software problem is largely solved; a working community of people who know and care, is the hard part. But it's also in the process of being solved by what StackExchange is doing: building sites around existing communities.

So here's what I think will eventually happen:

- human-machine interface / findability engine: Google

- clusters of (constantly updated) information: StackExchange sites (and others)

- niche content: your blog

In this future I'm not sure there's much room for Wikipedia; Wikipedia was built around the idea that there is such a thing as "static" knowledge or "eternal truth". There isn't: knowledge is a process and a conversation.

(Wikipedia is in fact a kind of cache for the current state of knowledge, but that problem could probably be solved differently and more efficiently.)

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#32

Post by evangineer »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #12
evangineer wrote: post #3

My longstanding beef with deletionism is that it goes against the Wiki Way. If Ward's wiki had operated in the same way, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as influential and useful.

But Ward's wiki is topic-focused, which is itself a good layer of defense. It's full of important (to us) but abstruse subjects like Liskov-substitutability, which simply aren't going to hold the interest of the people who want to maintain exhaustive lists of Pokémon characters.

Hmm, that would suggest a decentralized network of domain-specific wikis would be a more robust model than Wikipedia's centralized one.

Back in the day, Lion Kimbro was heavily advocating for something like that using the notion of WikiNodes to interconnect the wikis: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/action=browse&id=WikiNode&#...

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#33

Post by olavk »

bane wrote: post #16

Hopefully this takes off. After years of complaints and issues with rampant deletionism and abusive editors, Wikimedia has finally started to collect statistics on how this has negatively effected the quality, depth and breadth of the project. I can't find the Wikimedia Foundation report on this (it coincided with the great programming deletion incident), but it was almost universally negative. Some of the more recen…

> With bits being basically free these days

The work required to maintain quality is not free though. The larger Wikipedia becomes, the more resources are needed to ensure a high quality.

There is already a system completely free of "deletionism" with limitless scope which anyone can publish anything on. Its called the web. Why do people want their favorite topic published on Wikipedia rather than on their own page? Because they want the additional authority which comes from being on Wikipedia. But this authority comes from quality control.

I think some of the complaints against deletionism could be resolved with independent domain-specific wikipedias with different rules. For example a programming language-pedia could allow original content written by the language designers, something that is not appropriate for wikipedia.

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#34

Post by olavk »

bambax wrote: post #31

Isn't Google the answer to deletionism? Why should and and all content be stored in a special place called "wikipedia" or some other name, when you can write anything you want about any subject on your blog and have it indexed by a central search engine? Wikipedia offers two things that lone blog posts don't: collaborative editing and "findability" (SEO). Findability should be the problem of search engines; the fact…

Wikipedia is "the mainstream consensus", a compilation of knowledge that is generally agreed upon by reasonably sane and well-informed people, in a format accessible by the layman. I think that will continue to be valuable.

If you are a layman who wants to know "what is a computer" or "what is programming", then Wikipedia is a much better starting point than Stackoverflow or Don Knuths personal blog.

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#36

Post by bane »

olavk wrote: post #33
bane wrote: post #16

Hopefully this takes off. After years of complaints and issues with rampant deletionism and abusive editors, Wikimedia has finally started to collect statistics on how this has negatively effected the quality, depth and breadth of the project. I can't find the Wikimedia Foundation report on this (it coincided with the great programming deletion incident), but it was almost universally negative. Some of the more recen…

> With bits being basically free these days The work required to maintain quality is not free though. The larger Wikipedia becomes, the more resources are needed to ensure a high quality. There is already a system completely free of "deletionism" with limitless scope which anyone can publish anything on. Its called the web. Why do people want their favorite topic published on Wikipedia rather than on their own page?…

Why do people want their favorite topic published on Wikipedia rather than on their own page? Because they want the additional authority which comes from being on Wikipedia. But this authority comes from quality control.

I actually find wikipedia's aggregation and summarization of information just as, if not more, valuable than the authority angle.

There actually are some quite interesting domain localized wikis around, on top of the random wiki for a game or fan wiki (or encyclopedia dramatica or conservapedia for that matter)

http://www.wikia.com/Wikia

http://www.wikispaces.com/

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#38

Post by gojomo »

skrebbel wrote: post #35

Smells like vaporware. I never really trust it when people first make a blog and a domain and a fancy headline and a fancy logo, and write prose with lots of "will be's" and "will have's", all without showing anything substantial.

I'm delighted that two unicode characters smushed together ('∞³') strikes you as a fancy logo. If you're patient enough, you'll probably like the other design choices that are coming, too.

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#39

Post by raldi »

gojomo wrote: post #38
skrebbel wrote: post #35

Smells like vaporware. I never really trust it when people first make a blog and a domain and a fancy headline and a fancy logo, and write prose with lots of "will be's" and "will have's", all without showing anything substantial.

I'm delighted that two unicode characters smushed together ('∞³') strikes you as a fancy logo. If you're patient enough, you'll probably like the other design choices that are coming, too.

Don't take his criticism too hard. It's just part of the startup culture: Get something out there and in front of real users, as early as possible, so you can begin the virtuous cycle of success.

Re: Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

#40

Post by gojomo »

raldi wrote: post #39
gojomo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm delighted that two unicode characters smushed together ('∞³') strikes you as a fancy logo. If you're patient enough, you'll probably like the other design choices that are coming, too.

Don't take his criticism too hard. It's just part of the startup culture: Get something out there and in front of real users, as early as possible, so you can begin the virtuous cycle of success.

No worries; this isn't my first spin around the roller rink.

I've struggled with the question of whether it's better to talk in advance of something to show, or just wait until launch and let the site speak for itself.

I've decided to talk about the vision and general themes before tangible launch for two reasons:

(1) With any such community-built project, who shows up in the early days will have a giant influence on how it develops... and I'm hoping a little bit of advance discussion will mean more of Infinithree's natural userbase can find it and participate as soon as it's ready.

(2) We'll need plenty of help. So if the general outline strongly resonates with potential deep (even eventually full-time) collaborators, I'd love to start working with them even before public launch.

So I'm taking the risk of both the immediate 'vaporware' and eventual 'underwhelmed' reactions with full awareness of how these things can go.

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