Proposal:Fusion of social network and Wikimedia

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

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Achieve continued growth in readership
Focus on quality content
Increase Participation
Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
Encourage Innovation

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Summary

Goal of this proposal is to extend Wikipedia by combining social networking features and Wikipedia concepts in order to provide reliable attractive URLs, news, blog posts, etc. tied to Wikipedia articles. SNEWi stands for Social NEtworking WIki.

All users who enable proposed extension would see several additional tabs on the Wikipedia article page:

URL – contains any URL, for example original research, personal opinion, first hand story, information about related activity etc.
News – contains news (any information what quickly became obsolete)
Catalog – contains any offers for sell related to the article

These tabs contain items selected and verified by the neighbors of the user in the social network.

In contrary to the Wikipedia article these items should not be constrained by the most of Wikipedia rules. They can include personal opinion, first hand story, original research etc.

In order to keep reasonable quality of content, technology of filtering and verification of information in social network is proposed.

Proposal

There are several key principles that differentiate proposed service:

Any user can attach an URL/News post, etc to the article;

Any user can (and encouraged to) vote for or against attached items;

Each user can select “trusted advisers” among other users. Votes from these “trusted advisers” are used lately for sorting items attached to a Wikipedia article. Social network is formed on the basis of “trusted advisers” relationship;

Users can rely not only on the votes of trusted advisers, but also on the votes of trusted advisers for trusted advisers with theoretically infinite recursion(see circle of advisers);

All items in the tabs are sorted according to the votes from selected trusted advisers;

trusted advisers should be linked with a Wikipedia category. For example, it would be possible to select different trusted advisers for categories “Music” and “Science”

Concept of trusted adviser is similar to “friend” or “connection” relationship in a social network. However, it is more specific connection. To be a trusted adviser for someone means just to be trusted to select and grade information for this person and nothing more.

Users select trusted advisors themselves from all other users. Each user has it own set of trusted adviser. There is no hierarchy of trusted advisers; it's a social network where people are trusted advisers for each other.

All users who decide to use social networking feature with Wikipedia would see several addition tabs on the wikipedia article page:

Directory –

Displays list of recommended URLs. "Recommended" means that the URL was graded by trusted advisers. It could be a link to any kind of URL: to a site, to an individual page, to a blog message, to a media file. URLs are sorted according to grading from trusted advisers.

Catalog –

Provides offers of any goods and service. Anybody can attach his/her own offer or advertising to the article. Users would see this list sorted according to grading from trusted advisers.

News –

Provides reference to news and any other information with short expiration period. it could be global news such as president election results, global economical forecast, etc or local news such as exhibition announcement, invitation to travel together, update on a cat show in small town.

In each tab (Directory, News, Catalog) the user can choose between two different viewing options:

This article view -

Only items attached to this article are displayed. Most of the articles have no items evaluated by immediate circle of advisers. In this case grades of advisers for advisers (so called far circle of advisers) are used. In a regular social network users typically have thousands friends on their third circle. Chances that somebody of them would grade necessary information are quite high.

This category view -

If this article is a category, then all items attached to all articles from this category are displayed.

Some categories (for example Architecture) could contain a great number of articles. But normally users would go only thru top ranked items among enormous amount of found posts.

In case when selected Wikipedia article is not a category than items attached to semantically close articles are displayed.

Motivation

Motivation is to expand scope of wikimedia and build service which provides reference to reliable, attractive and personalized content. In particular:

Key Questions

To be filled

Potential Costs

To be filled

References

http://www.snewi.org/index.php/Main

Community Discussion

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