Erik Moeller on Wikipedia 2.0
This is a response from Erik Moeller to me concerning the New Scientist article I talked about earlier.
To be clear, movement towards a usable stable versions is a good thing. However, this is one of the first major technical- and content-oriented initiatives being handled with money and oversight by the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees, or a delegate thereof. And for that reason, to channel Dwight Eisenhower, this “is new in the Wikipedia experience.”
Andrew, I attempted to post the following, but I got an error message “Error: This file cannot be used on its own.” when trying to post a comment on your blog.
Luca de Alfaro gave a presentation at Wikimania 2007, and has been in touch with both Sue Gardner and our Technical Staff. Tim Starling commented about his work here:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-%22Software-Weighs-Wikipedians%27-Trustworthiness%22-p12011354.html
Please be sure to read Luca’s actual paper before commenting on any of the potential problems with his approach:
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~luca/papers/07/wikiwww2007.pdf
We have provided Luca with the kind of live feed that we normally only give to companies to do his research in real time, and right now he’s working to process a full dump of the English Wikipedia. I have suggested that we could then offer a MediaWiki “tab” that could show the articles with trust coloring overlay.
Initially this could be something that editors add by modifying their user JavaScript, like navigation popups and countless other tools. The trust coloring itself would run on Luca’s servers (but inside a MonoBook skin).
After my conversations with Jim Giles this was condensed into “incorporated into Wikipedia” in the New Scientist article, which is an error (we’re going to send a correction on Monday). It’s not Jim’s mistake, though, as he sent me my quotes for approval, and I overlooked that particular part.
In essence, anything we do with Luca’s work will be done in stages, and with plenty of time for community feedback and so forth.
That said, I personally think that the kind of “overlay” functionality that Luca could provide (trust coloring for Wikipedia articles) is one of many overlays that could be useful. Wikipedia is a treasure for data miners, and in my opinion, it would be neat to think of a way to integrate recent research directly into the site, similar to the way
Google Earth integrates content overlays.
