Re:The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History
by gojomo on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @02:51PM
(#4912057)
Inclusionist 'forks', 'annexes', or 'salvage yards' have been attempted a few times. They usually adopt the same MediaWiki software and general article-format, for familiarity and ease of starting-up.
But, since that stack has coevolved with community practices, it is essentially dependent on the same mentalities, content-standards, and critical mass of contributors in order to function at all. A site that's "exactly Wikipedia, but inclusionist" imports many of the stresses and doctrinal limitations that have fed deletionist urges, but without a vibrant-enough seed community to build the full set of alternate practices that inclusionism would allow.
Between other projects, I've been working on an alternate kind of reference wiki that I believe can capture more info without as much conflict. Variances from standard Wikipedia/MediaWiki I'm trying are:
• all information must be contributed in small capped-size chunks – think about 2-3 times as large as a tweet, or like a Google search result snippet but in complete sentences
• community scoring of chunk quality, so that rough/undersourced/needs-improvement material can live on, somewhat out of view, rather than being lost completely to deletion
• extensive use of atomic, single-click feedback (upvotes, flags, likes, thanks, etc.) for quick reinforcement/correction loops (learning from Facebook, Quora, Twitter, etc.)
Though recent updates are few, you can read more about the plans and progress at my project blog – http://blog.thunkpedia.org. Following the @thunkpedia twitter handle or otherwise contacting me will get you invited to the beta as soon as it opens.
But, since that stack has coevolved with community practices, it is essentially dependent on the same mentalities, content-standards, and critical mass of contributors in order to function at all. A site that's "exactly Wikipedia, but inclusionist" imports many of the stresses and doctrinal limitations that have fed deletionist urges, but without a vibrant-enough seed community to build the full set of alternate practices that inclusionism would allow.
Between other projects, I've been working on an alternate kind of reference wiki that I believe can capture more info without as much conflict. Variances from standard Wikipedia/MediaWiki I'm trying are:
• all information must be contributed in small capped-size chunks – think about 2-3 times as large as a tweet, or like a Google search result snippet but in complete sentences
• community scoring of chunk quality, so that rough/undersourced/needs-improvement material can live on, somewhat out of view, rather than being lost completely to deletion
• extensive use of atomic, single-click feedback (upvotes, flags, likes, thanks, etc.) for quick reinforcement/correction loops (learning from Facebook, Quora, Twitter, etc.)
Though recent updates are few, you can read more about the plans and progress at my project blog – http://blog.thunkpedia.org. Following the @thunkpedia twitter handle or otherwise contacting me will get you invited to the beta as soon as it opens.