Is Monmouthpedia The Future Of Wikipedia?
from the wheels-within-wheels dept
One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is: What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it aspire to be a total encyclopedia of everything? What is the appropriate level of detail?
As might be expected in a community made up of volunteers, feelings run high over these apparently dry questions of philosophy. Just as there are free software and open source factions that work together for a common cause, but eternally snipe at each other over details, so the Wikipedia community harbors two groups that agree to disagree on what is the proper scope for the project: the deletionists and the inclusionists. Here's what Wikipedia itself has to say on them:
"Deletionists" are proponents of selective coverage and removal of articles seen as unnecessary or highly substandard. Deletionist viewpoints are commonly motivated by a desire that Wikipedia be focused on and cover significant topics – along with the desire to place a firm cap upon proliferation of promotional use (seen as abuse of the website), trivia, and articles which are of no general interest, lack suitable source material for high quality coverage, or are too short or otherwise unacceptably poor in quality.
One particular area where the limits of inclusionism and deletionism are tested is local information. Should Wikipedia strive to provide the same level of detail about local information as it does about global facts? If so, how?
"Inclusionists" are proponents of broad retention, including retention of "harmless" articles and articles otherwise deemed substandard to allow for future improvement. Inclusionist viewpoints are commonly motivated by a desire to keep Wikipedia broad in coverage with a much lower entry barrier for topics covered – along with the belief in that it is impossible to tell what knowledge might be "useful" or productive, that content often starts poor and is improved if time is allowed, that there is effectively no incremental cost of coverage, that arbitrary lines in the sand are unhelpful and may prove divisive, and that goodwill requires avoiding arbitrary deletion of others' work. Some extend this to include allowing a wider range of sources such as notable blogs and other websites.
Maybe Wikipedia has found a way to do so without overloading the main encyclopedia: create a mini-Wikipedia devoted entirely to one location – in this case Monmouthpedia, about the Welsh town of Monmouth:
Monmouthpedia will be the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town, creating articles on interesting and notable places, people, artifacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible including Welsh.
There are a number of interesting facets to this project. The first is the direct involvement of local people. By limiting the range of the entries to one location it might prove easier to motivate new contributors – a perennial concern for the larger Wikipedia – and allow them to capture key aspects of a place they know well.
We are very keen for local people to be involved in what ever way they would like. Computer skills are not that important, it’s the interest and the willingness to be involved, suggesting and writing articles, taking and donating photos and recommending good reference materials. If you speak another language it would be a great place to practice your writing skills and learn new vocabulary and grammar. There are a lot of opportunities for community involvement including teaching and learning of I.T skills, local history, natural history, languages and people of different ages working together.
The amount, detail and quality of the information we could create is amazing. The Council for British Archaeology has designated Monmouth as the 7th best town in Britain. Knowledge gives us context, it allows us to appreciate our surroundings more, Monmouth may be first place in the world to offer its tourist information in up to 270 languages.
Monmouthpedia will use QRpedia codes, a type of bar code a smartphone can read through its camera that takes you to a Wikipedia article in your language. QR codes are extremely useful, physical signs have no way of displaying the same amount of information and in a potentially huge number of languages.
Articles will have coordinates (geotags) to allow a virtual tour of the town using the Wikipedia layer on Google Streetview, Google Maps and will be available in augmented reality software including Layar.
The use of QR codes in physical signage around the town will add a new directionality to the links between Monmouthpedia and the town it describes. Similarly, the geotags in the articles will allow text and images linked to geographical locations to be loaded automatically as people walk around with suitable apps on their smartphones. Obviously, once in place, that localized QR-coded infrastructure could also be exploited by other, quite different smartphone programs, to produce fascinating geo-informational mashups.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Monmouthpedia is that it creates a kind of fractal Wikipedia. That's important because if it functions well, it sets a precedent for a new, nested kind of Wikipedia whose entries can sometimes drop down a level to an entirely new Wikipedia-like resource about a specific topic. Maybe the ultimate test of Monmouthpedia's success will be when people start creating wikis about those same "places, people, artifacts, flora, fauna and other things" that will soon fill its pages – an Inception-like Wikipedia within a Wikipedia within a Wikipedia.
Update: see this comment from a Wikipedian involved with the project for some clarifications.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: crowd sourced, local services, monmouth, uk, wikipedia
Companies: wikimedia
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Deeply recursive Wikipedia: interesting idea, but unlikely
[ link to this | view in thread ]
2nd largest Wiki is about World of Warcraft
I could see a lot of little wiki(the plural of wiki is ???) being setup and then having wikipedia link to them. This might not be possible right now, but I could see someone going to wikipedia and wanting the super detailed wiki pages of a local city.
Wikipedia will need some way to send links outbound, or to incorporate other wiki info into itself, for the more focused wiki(s?). This could end up with wiki being almost a search engine if it becomes more of a portal than a source itself.
I could see lots of scenarios where super detailed pages would be of interest. Someone looking for the 'right' combination of materials to combine in a video game to get the desired goal.... this might only be desired information by a small minority of the population, but those who would enjoy it would do so at a very high degree.
Its not like there aren't already going to be websites with this information on it. Wikipedia/wiki media should look into ways to incorporate specialty wikis into the fold.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Think how this micro-wikipedia could be integrated with alternative reality devices.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Worth following.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: 2nd largest Wiki is about World of Warcraft
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Deeply recursive Wikipedia: interesting idea, but unlikely
Just the coordination seems to happen on that specific sub-wiki.
PS. I am not affiliated with that project.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
and it shows wikipedia's shortcomings
Thus we have solutions that already exist for part of the problem: google, yelp, grubhub, foursquare, etc, but none are perfect.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
The Inclusionists and the Deletionists have pretty much reached a consensus that information can be included if it can be confirmed by reliable sources. The argument now is about what is a reliable source and even there the gap is not that wide (though, of course, that doesn't make the arguments less vocal). Newspaper coverage is a reliable source to prove you exist and have done something interesting enough to have an article. Your blog can then be used as a reliable source for info like your date of birth. Books, TV shows, places are themselves Reliable Sources for info like their plot or location (except Bielefeld).
The thing that is anathema to Wikipedia is Original Research - that wonderful thing you just discovered. Banning Original Research has been a very effective way of keeping crackpots off Wikipedia so it is a policy which is not likely to disappear anytime soon. If you have a wonderful new theory then get it published in a peer reviewed journal first and when we see how the rest of your field receive it we will consider including it.
Monmouthpedia is a project to develop articles for wikipedia. It doesn't exist as a separate entity. There have been proposals for local history Wikis to collect and record the sort of local knowledge which isn't written down in Reliable Sources. Wikipedians in India and South Africa ran the Oral Citations project to look at how Wikipedians can help with this. If WikiMedia does this sort of Original Research it will be in a separate project however like Wikinews.org and if they can show they have taken the appropriate measures to make their information reliable then the various Wikipedias in different languages may consider using it for their articles.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
This was MY idea!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Open Source - The Good and Bad
What is troubling with "open source", as this post alludes to, is that there can be a lot of friction in terms of focus and future direction. This can lead to a lot of wasted effort.
Back in 2010 Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which had the rights to MySQL and OpenOffice. It appears, that as a result of this acquisition, that MySQL and OpenOffice have been "forked" into duplicate efforts (MariaDB and LibreOffice). Innovation is good, but progress can be stymied should egos and petty politics cause efforts to loose focus and even become paralyzed.
(PS: I have NO knowledge of why this "fork" occurred, so I am not implying that egos or petty politics were the cause.)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Open Source - The Good and Bad
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
I have also often thought that other wikis could and should layer upon Wikipedia, linking to it, but not expecting many if any links back. Ultimately, I expect many wikis to be similarly layered, the combination representing the variety of opinions, and the core, Wikipedia, representing our common sense.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Open Source - The Good and Bad
[ link to this | view in thread ]
I think any organizational entity can and should have his own wiki site (with CC other public content license) and then dedicated sites can follow their own policy, but wikipedia can copy some parts of it, if seems necessary.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
or James Scott, 1St Syjw id Monmouth will call copyright on the name 1..
[ link to this | view in thread ]
This Article
I'm doing an awful lot of the work for the project (as a staff member at Wikipedia), and I'm afraid you've misunderstood what Monmouthpedia is.
It's not a mini-Wikipedia for Monmouth, it's a project to write articles on Wikipedia about everything that Monmouth has. Interesting buildings, football clubs, rivers, local bands - everything that fulfils Wikipedia notability criteria. Think of it as hundreds of Wikipedians descending on Monmouth and completely documenting everything about the town and its environs.
It's *not* going to be a separate wiki, and Wikipedia will *not* be splitting itself up into smaller wikis!
Feel free to contact me about this: richard.symonds a/t wikimedia.org.uk
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: This Article
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Old idea
I would love to see if wikipedia could downscale on local areas and specialist fields, so we don't have to deal with a hundred thousand seperate wikis and search engines.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Monmouthpedia
My name is Steve Moss and I'm a final year PhD student based at the University of Wales, Caerleon campus. I'm currently investigating visitor experiences of heritage attractions in Monmouth, with particular focus on Shire Hall, Nelson/Monmouth Museum and Monmouthpedia. I wonder whether you would be kind enough to complete a short anonymous questionnaire based on your experience of Monmouthpedia by clicking the relevant link below:
Shire Hall: http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=65z6nbr37y64ocz464769
Nelson Museum: http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=rkbf5aove11cp4w464883
Monmouthpedia: http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=xjqxbr5ssf9f4ya464549
If you would like more information about the project I am undertaking, or the surveys, please do not hesitate to contact me and I will be happy to oblige.
Email: stevemoss17@hotmail.com
Phone: 07792 416 258
Thanks for your time,
Steve
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Deeply recursive Wikipedia: interesting idea, but unlikely
Given that you've commented on the Monmouthpedia concept, I wonder whether you have used the project itself. I ask as I'm currently doing PhD research based on user experiences, and would be grateful if you could please take a few moments to complete an anonymous questionnaire by following the link below:
http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=xjqxbr5ssf9f4ya464549
If you'd like more information, please feel free to contact me at stevemoss17@hotmail.com
Kind regards,
Steve
[ link to this | view in thread ]