Wikipedia — is it time to converge with Web 2.0?

Seen as it’s the norm for mostly every site on the internet now to start to think about web 2.0, isn’t it about time that the wikipedia focused on a more social way of collaborating on articles? Maybe the time has come for the spiffy AJAX effects to jump out of the bag and start to help those editing the wikipedia to do their “thang” with increased ease.

At the moment, a brief glance at the MediaWiki interface doesn’t really yield much impress, but rather presents you with an interface that you simply have to get used to. At the moment, i find the history and most other aspects simply too rudimentary and basic to provide any useful correlation of results and information. While it could be argued that it is the job of the editor to do the research and reference the articles, i still can’t help but think that to entice new users, some form of optional-guidance would really provide an extra layer of help to those who are new to the situation of the wikipedia and the like.

Similarly, myself and others who have gone to the wikipedia from editing articles about medicine and neuroscience in microsoft word have found the wiki syntax a breath of fresh air, and extremely easy to use, with regards to that of mediawiki. However, when i was provided with the rest of the interface, i felt that, as a neuroscience-heavy person, i was short changed. I mean no disrespect to the editors or developers of wikipedia, but i feel that there is great room for improvement in some of the things — the current features, such as the history, watchlist, and soforth just seem like a foreach loop spitting out a list, when it could be so much more.

In terms of the watchlist, it could be adapted to a last.fm style dashboard, providing you with the lists of monitored information and events that are going on, but also, and more importantly, there could be the potential for allowing you to view, in a human-readable way, what the heck is going on around what you’re editing. When you look at google mail, as another excellent example, there’s a lot of seemingly “flashy-for no reason” features, but on the whole, they add the whole veneer of ease of use, and provide you with a continuous user interface, which, in terms of neurological processing, provides less of the “EH? Where’d that come from” reflex.

I mean, looking at the amount of potential that the wikipedia has, it’d also be a wise decision to emphasise the social aspect of the editors who are on there, by providing more of a framework than a simple wiki-editing-box. This could provide a platform for editors to become more friendly with eachother, but also to become more tuned to other people’s editing preferences, which could be used manyfold for collaborations, requests for verification and soforth.

I’m not saying that the wikipedia should provide a myspace style thing, but it’d be interesting, particularly because then there is some clear distinction between users and pages in terms of layout or storage, as it is, after all, just a “User:” slapped in front of it. However, don’t misconstrue this as an attempt to make wikipedia into a non-wiki, i merely offer the suggestion that the wikipedia could easily provide “wizards”, which generate wiki code, or provide an abstration layer, which makes the editing and socialising process a whole lot easier.

After you get used to the wikipedia, you become acclamatised to the situation and you begin to know exactly what to do, in regards to what thing to click, and when. Still, the adoption curve for the usability, in my experience takes quite a long time for people to get used to — when you go from an interface which tells you in a human way, what is going on, there’s an easier adoption path. If you’re reading something as a sentence, psychological framework and neurological structure has already been developed for you to understand the sentence, so there is no need for you to learn it.

There are those who would prefer a more technical interfac, but that is afterall, based upon antecedent structures which converge to produce different human responses. I’m merely offering the suggestion that in the majority, it may be easier to simply provide a brief summary of what’s gone on, rather than have a user read through a ream of information about how to understand the layout of a page.

One example that springs to mind is the history page;

” (Latest | Earliest) View (previous 50) (next 50) (20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500).

For any version listed below, click on its date to view it. For more help, see Help:Page history and Help:Edit summary. “

To me, the interface is not something i’ve never used before, i’ve used it so many times that i’m able to recall what is where in my sleep, but when i take back and actually look at it, it really seems like a hack; the listing just seems disconnected with the rest of the layout, and the way in which “m, b, —>”, etc are described seems like it’s been typed in as a beta draft, and not been changed by a user-interface checker

It’s been raised also about the chat mechanism of wikipedia not being adequate, and i agree. While phpBB is nice, it’d be very easy to have posts and replies formatted in wiki-style, editable by someone who has been rated by the people who have edited the page as a suitable trustee or something of the like. That brings me onto author ratings; an intuitive idea in which users can rate the usefulness of edits that a user has made and rate that particular person’s attributes (expansion,referencing,antivandalism) and the like.

More to come in a later post

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