RecentChanges.info

List of Medical Wikis 

HOLY COW!! 49

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.

WikiIndex link to article

From [[Wikinews]] comes thin story:
: [[Wikipedia:Yell|Yell]], the worlds biggest yellow pages publisher, today threatened to shut down [[Yellowikis]], the wiki based yellow pages directory.

: They accused Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) of “misrepresentation”, “passing off” and suggested that using the name Yellowikis could “constitute an ‘instrument of fraud’”

: Yell are demanding that Paul and Rosa Close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. (Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, Yellowikis made a loss of $500 which was used to print t-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt)

”’editors note, does anyone know how to make WordPress correctly format MediaWiki markup?”’

An excellent article, The Independent: New Media: Who are the real winners now we’ve all gone Wiki-crazy?

What wiki does for its users is what blogging did for web publishing: it provides an easy, quick, means to an end. In the words of Ward Cunningham, an author and an inventor of wiki technology: “Wiki does for knowledge what the assembly line does for material.”

Refreshing to see others with the hopeful vision, nice work Ana Kronschnabel and Thomas Rawlings

“If you haven’t seen Ze Frank’s hilarious videoblog, it’s worth checking out. A few weeks ago he challenged visitors to create an “Earth Sandwich” where two pieces of bread are placed exactly opposite each other on the globe. Google mashups showing what’s on the opposite side of the Earth and a live GeoRSS-based bread gallery were provided. A piece on NPR this Saturday details the concept and a team from New Zealand and Spain completed the challenge. Then on Friday he allowed his show to be written by his viewers who battled out 2,000+ script revisions in a Wiki. Sunday’s New York Times describes the results.” via Slashdot

Ze Frank is getting more popular, and one of the tricks in his bag is a wiki that he is encouraging folks to help write the daily 3 minute video weblog show. Very fun. After the first script was written by many, many folks fighting to have what they thought funny be on the front of the script, it was like writing by committee. I suggested they think about the wiki in a different way, and stop focusing on the main page.

Over at the wonderful video weblog zefrank, he has opened up the script writing up to contributors of his wiki

The wiki is used to write the script for the show: Fabulouso Friday. Was it successful?

“Congratulations on 1,500+ script edits and over 15,000 views of the Fabuloso Friday script!”