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Angela Beesley – Beyond encylopedias – The rest of the library [Wikimania 2008 notes]

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Wikipedia, 10million articles and lots of articles. Isn’t that enough, so why would we need other wiki’s?

 

Wikipedia is not a lot of heap of things – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOT

 

So what do you do with these things?

 

Wikimedia has educational goal. There is another company Wikia, that runs these specialized wiki’s.

 

Variation of popularity within Wikia

 

 -> 5000 very active users per month in gaming but only 183 in books

< 10,000 monthly pageviews in health, compared to 11.3 million for WoWWiki alone.

 

Health wikis

Zh-tw.med.wikia.com is the most visited health wiki at Wikia bus has < 600 pages

Locked down editing is common

 – E.g. – Elsevier’s “Wiser wiki” asks for verification of physician qualitifactions

 

Wikipedia is far more detailed and complete than the largest specialist health wikis. So health is not really working on separe wiki’s. One of the reasons for this could be that it’s a encyclpedia topic and encourage in Wikipedia.

 

Gaming content

The content is reguraly delted from Wikipedia. Doesn’t fit the “textbook” model. It’s often seen as trivial or non-important.

 

Wikibooks also has policy it’s not for for video game strategy guides.

 

Topics deemed “unenycyclopedic” can thrive on their own. The 3 top gaming wikis have more articles then all the health wiki’s combined.

 

Comics and Wikipedia

  • Controversy led to creation of Comixpedia
  • Still many comic-related deletions
  • Growing number of independent comics wikis
  • Marvel Database has 26,000 articles.

 

Recipes

In 2004 lots of recipes got deleted from Wikipedia. Wikipedia asks people to add recipes to Wikibooks Cookbooks, but it’s often not well received. You can’t add variations of recipes and such.

 

Wikipedia and social networking

People tried playing chess on Wikipedia, or do social networks. All of these things were deleted.

 

Wikia builds into software itself tools that allow such operations.

 

What is needed regarding deletion:

  • Better workflow for information initially in the wrong place
  • Easier ways to find the correct place

 

WikiRecycle

A bot takes articles thar are listed for non-speedy deletion

Archives them where they can be reused by other wikis, with full attribution.

 

What is needed

  • Links between projects:
  • Part of interface
  • Automated
  • Appealing

 

This also works for languages. It’s also possible to do Geo-location so Wikipedia could suggest right place.

 

Benefits

  • Less loss of content; more availability of free content
  • Less loss of contributors
  • Less ill-feeling toward Wikipedia

 

 

Jimmy Wales – Wikia search

 

Search principles

  • Transparency
  • Collaboration
  • Quality
  • Privacy

 

Designing a search editing process that it’s Wiki like. It’s a very different thing in a search context. It’s about links, much more granular piece of information. People really like debating and discussing things, and not add links without lots of social context.

 

Wikia Search it’s whitelisting pages that are community related.

 

When you search, you get different options next to search results. You can edit, annotate, spotlight, delete. There’s a full transparency of who changed what etc.

 

They’re trying “Facebook style” profile pages. 

 

Search roadmap

Wikia expecst it to be at least 1.5 years before we will be fully competitive

Their mission right now is to build the tools and community

 

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