Proposal - Fusion_of_social_network_and_Wikimedia

Let me send for consideration our proposal.

Proposal:Fusion_of_social_network_and_Wikimedia.

We think it belongs to scope of this task force.

>What role does expansion into content beyond core encyclopedic information have in

>advancing Wikimedia's vision of "the sum of all knowledge"?

Purpose of proposal is

provide means to attach additional resource to wikipedia’s article: external URL, advertisement, news.

This idea is very old and there is no problem to implement it but...

The challenge is keep reasonable quality of attaching content.

Our idea is to use social network of “trusted adviser” for grading content. Idea is “social network of advisers instead of hierarchy of editors”. Details are in our proposal.

>How, if at all, could expansion into other content areas (both within Wikipedia and through

>sister projects) detract from the quality of the core encyclopedia and Wikimedia's brand? How

>could it improve the quality of the core encyclopedia and brand?

Content (url, advertisment, news) is attached to wikipedia articles. From other point of view each resource is tagged, and tags are wikipedia articles. From this point of view proposed solution is collaborative tagging system, where controlled vocabulary is wikipedia articles.

Requirements to wikipedia articles are reasonable requirements as well for tags of controlled vocabulary Wikipedia articles are from quite diverse areas and number of topics is growing

Other advantages: http://www.snewi.org/index.php/Tagging

Proposed system require some discipline and cooperative efforts. So community of wikipedia is best place to implement such idea.

>How could it improve the quality of the core encyclopedia and brand?

New content increase number of user and increase their motivation to improve articles

Grading the usefulness of external content with digg/reddit -style comes into mind. Clicking 1 button upvote would be fast and easy way to go. This would enable the needed quantity. But how to deal with all the vandalism, self-interested promotion etc. remains a complete mystery. One other thing which comes to mind is that we can't guarantee that the content on the other side of the link won't be changed. --Ras 09:40, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Social network is used to deal with vandalism (and so on).

Anybody can attach external link to article. However these links will be seen only for friends of attached user (or probably to friends of his friends).

Nobody do vandal action against friend.

If some one grade the attachment good, this attachment will be seen for friend of graded user. Such spreading by recommendation of friend is good, I think.

We propose to use one-way relationship "trusted adviser" instead of bidirectional "friend" in typical social network. This mean user choose whom he is trusted too. For example he can choose thrust to some well known expert. User know expert, but expert need not to know user.

Also it is impossible to impose oneself on anybody as expert.

Friends can be "trusted adviser" each no another. For example if my friend is keen on history I thrust to his grading. Also I can trust to any body he trust.

To avoid changing content it is possible to use CRC or digital signature. CRC of page can be stored by service together with link.

There are two opportunity to check CRC:

1. By service

Service can verify links in idle time

2. By user's browser.

Unfortunately it looks like plug-in required.

Additional information is on our collaboration server http://www.snewi.org

Interesting. CRC and digital signature is easy enough for avoiding changing content. Trusted adviser is also easier than friending, which would require two-way connecting of profiles (less interactivity, less complexity). You could just get a set of recommendations and stay in anonymity by yourself. Just a matter of finding a way how these "advisers" should be marketed. Technically this wouldn't need to be a Wikimedia project (if it were a browser plug-in), but to ever become popular it might.