RecentChanges.info

This weblog post is a little more personal than my other post

The process of organizing the wiki community - already parts of it that are organized, but for the most part, it is a bunch of interesting people doing interesting things.

“The Universal “Wiki” Edit Button leads to a page where you can collaborate, not just comment, commit or comply.” — Ward Cunningham, Inventor of Wiki

Personally, I am most excited by the Oddmuse implementation and am looking forward to extending that wiki out to more people’s attention.

It was very exciting to see wiki developers and wiki hosts extend their wikis into this idea and add themselves to the list.

All in all, this has been a fun few weeks, culminating in an exciting 30 hours or so. As with wiki, I look forward to what others will make of this.

“The amazing quality of many wikis, especially wikipedia, makes people afraid to contribute. But wikis want you to edit them. This button is meant as an invitation for surfers to contribute as much or as little as they want.” — Ehud Lamm

The first annual Antonio Pizzigati Prize for “Software in the Public Interest“ is going to be awarded later this month. In 2006, the Pizzigati Prize will award $10,000 to one individual who has created or led an effort to create a software product of significant value to the nonprofit sector. This is a really exciting development in the world of free software/open source/social source. Kudos to the Tides foundation for organizing it!!

The WagN project we blogged about last month is one of the 6 finalists for the prize. Please feel warmly welcomed to join me in supporting Ethan McCutchen and the WagN team at the peer review forum that the Tides foundation has set up for the 6 finalists.

WagN is revolutionary. It doesn’t just make the same old tasks slightly easier … it makes entirely new applications possible!

Structured data is really really important! Consider a document on the web that is written in English. The semantics (meanings) of English words and the rules of grammar for English provide structure for the document. That structure allows someone who has never encountered the document to read it and understand what it means. Without structure that both author and reader can extract meaning from, that document would be worthless.

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding an organization that serves battered women, writing a review of Ford’s workplace conditions, or searching for the greenest computer and buying it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines.

Computers are considerably bad at extracting meaning from English documents. So bad, that additional structure needs to be added to information to make it meaningful for computers.

When an organization wants to make information available in a format that a computer can understand, they traditionally have to resort to a relational database or specialized markup. The considerable weaknesses of these approaches include the following:

* Esoteric … only highly trained specialists can understand how the data is represented and modify that representation.
* Inflexible … special “human level” interfaces have to be cobbled onto the top of the database. These forms can only be changed by specialists.

Shoe-string operations in start-up mode simply don’t have the resources to create data that is computer-meaningful. This impedance mismatch between computers and ordinary folks is an old story that many a large project has tried to address. Most of these projects that have been going on for decades are still esoteric and inaccessible to ordinary folks.

This is where WagN enters the stage.

WagN provides a simple, flexible, and highly “human” accessible means to structure data in a form that computers can understand. In the years that I’ve been following developments in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, I haven’t come across anything as fresh and promising as WagN.

WagN hits the bullseye between human and computer accessibility of information. I’m confident that the world will look back on the development of semantic tagging for wikis as a watershed moment akin to the development of the web itself.

Keep on Rockin’ Ethan and team!!

More Perfect is a commercial venture intending to get people talking about legal and policy issues in the United States. More specifically, it’s an experiment in wiki-style, speculative, non-binding policy discussion based around

• specific issues — ranging from the local (such as maintaining the vitality and relevance of The New Seattle Center) to more sweeping (such as animal rights); and
• specific documents — for example, the Bill of Rights, where the point is clarify the document and elicit more general engagement.

While there is fairly little concrete detail about the structure of or motivations behind the project, the wiki seems open and inviting by design and text is available under a Creative Commons CCASL license.

More Perfect also has a few properties of interest to wiki developers, most notably

• a streamlined, cruft-free RecentChanges page (with full details behind a “Click for more details…” prompt);
• a fairly detailed set of “Getting Started” pages which, while too long and text-heavy to really be of much use, represent a good attempt at creating an invitation to participate; and
• a convention started by the founders, Tim and Chad, of listing specific “issues of interest to me” on user pages.

This is the official wiki for eBay users. eBay had the good folks at JotSpot aid in the design and customization of their standard wiki engine and as you can see, the result is a slick and well functioning wiki which combines eBay’s look and feel with Jot’s collaborative technology. The site is in beta, but it is already a vibrant wiki. This is because eBay users are already such a large group, and wiki’s thrive where there is already a community.

In looking more closely you will notice that there isn’t a traditional “recent changes” page. I had the pleasure of speaking with Ken Norton at Jot and he explained that the home page area showing “most recent articles” replaces that function. It doesn’t detail every single change, but it does algorythmically calculate which new articles are most likely to be interesting to readers and bubbles them up. This is better for users who wish to quickly see what’s happening. I wonder, however, why there isn’t a traditional recent changes also?

In addition, the wiki sports both comments and ratings. Two features that seem to go naturally with both wiki and eBay’s overall bend towards helping users create reputation online. The system shows how many users have rated a particular article and whether or not they found it useful — great feature.

Overall, this is a well thought out application of wiki technology which is suited to eBay’s needs and I’m sure it will be very successful.

At OSCamp this morning, I spent some time with Ethan McCutchen and Lewis Hoffman learning more about the Hooze.com and wagging. Hooze is focused on consumers and in particular, helping them create a shared and voice which may point companies in a directions that are more aligned with their consumers. Imagine having access to a huge collaboratively built database of consumer experience right at the point of purchase — that would be valuable.

The underlying technology is a wiki of sorts, but because it leverages tagging and “cards”, they call it “wagging” (wiki+tagging). Cute. Not to mention that it has the “tail wagging the dog” feeling which sends a good grass roots message. In the wagging environment, each tag you create has a snippet of information attached to it, like a card or a page. But the power is created when you combine tags. So if there was a tag for “Ray King” and a tag for “Razr”, then I would naturally put my experience with Razr’s on that page. Once there is a critical mass of this information, then looking up any topic brings up a rich subset of other related topics. I look forward to watching this get off the ground. There’s more information on wagging at their system site, WagN.

SpaceDebate is a collaborative site whose aim is to create a structured “argument tree” which more clearly shows the various points of view on US military space policy. It claims to be like WikiPedia, but I think the similarity is more conceptual than functional. What’s neat is that it allows people with different points of view to air their differences and come out smarter and possibly even on the same page.

The ability to build consensus among people who are geographically diverse and not operating in the same time zones is really exciting and I think this site is one of many to come.

More and more creative ideas are being thought of every day. WikiBios allow people to create a stub of a biography and then have their friends, family and co-workers edit it to perfection … or honesty! I’m not sure what Wiki Engine it uses, but what is neat is that they’ve gone beyond basic wiki added functionality that really makes this specific application sing. For example, on a given page, you’ll see links for “People I know”, “Bio’s I’ve edited” and “My Editors”. That’s rich because allows the user to quickly browse around various circles of people. I’m impressed and think this will do well.

I found this interesting mashup, WikiMapia, which is very cool even though it is missing some of the basic wiki tools. I am having trouble adding pages, but other people aren’t. The process seems to be similar to the way Flickr tags photos.

Wikimapia is a new project created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev aimed at “describing the whole planet earth”. They have created an excellent way to accomplish this goal. Using a mixture of Google Maps satellite imagery, a “wiki” editing mechanism and tagging, Wikimapia lets anyone add or edit a description for any place on earth

via Google Maps Mania: Wiki + Google Maps = Wikimapia

[…] More than 450 DrKW employees have internal blogs and the bank has built an internal wiki with more than 2,000 pages which is used by a quarter of its workforce. After just six months, the traffic on the wiki exceeds that on the entire DrKW intranet. […] The wiki is also used with video clips to substitute traditional manuals in training new recruits. […] DrKW uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to inform employees when the contents of wikis or blogs are changed.

via The Next Wave At Work: Neville Hobson

I have been following Phil Jones over at Platform Wars for a little while now. While I don’t exactly understand OPML - I do understand that people are interested in how it would work in wiki, possibly to help with some standardization in wiki markup. From ZDNet:

Like blogs, wikis make Web authoring a snap until you want to do something beyond the publication of simple text.