Talk:Three Questions and Three Answers as Food for Thought About the Future of Wikipedia

No more encyclopedias on earth ?

I think this is not correct. Because Wikiepdia does not have all the knowledge of the world of course and there is still a huge amount of knowledge not freely available.

Except that this knowledge is now specialized by domain (defeating the purpose of an "encyclopedia" to cover all subjects, but still in line with its goal which is to be as extensive as possible. Wikipedia is still not extensive in lot of domains :

• medecine (definitely it will never be)
• creative medias (not free for most parts, but we live with that: there's a need to support it either by commerce, or by advertizing, but Wikiepdia will never run ads, so these medias will have to be paid and protected... for some reasonnable time to allow their creation and allow artists to live from their work, at leastr for a reasonnable part of their life, just like other workers).
• history and politics : even with our NPOV policy it is difficult to conciliate the different point of views and allow each one to have an exhaustive coverage, even if they are oriented. that's why we have dedicated teams working on their own vision, we just must be able to create links to enough of them even if we don't expose all their views.
• genealogy, biographies : there's lot of issues related to protection of personality and privacy. And many facts are not verifiable (and should not be : we all want to behave socially with different personalities without mixing them, we are not Facebook and don't want to steal private life and enclose people within boxes showing all what they do or think sometime, or create a situation in which they cannot change opinion and be trusted. Our socilalization is context dependant, and evolves over time/age. That's normal. And we want to forget things about out own life. This ability gives us freedom of choice for our actions. And "free" in our projects includes the promotion of freedom, and the right to disappear or being forgotten. All our "social contracts" have a life time shorter than ur own life. We don't plan anything for an infinite time because we want also to remain adaptive to changing situations. Thanks today it is possible on the Internet to have several personalities, as long as websites are not too much intrusive (like Facebook) and don't keep illegal records to prevent us to change our actions or opinions.

So the good question remains: does an encyclopedia have to contain ALL the knowledge possible or even ALL the sharable knowledge ? Probably not, but it must be extensive enough to open many doors and understand the world in which we live and lead us to ways that have been explored by others. The encyclopedia is not there to teach everything we must know to perform something, but must allow us to discover how to look for it, ans show some demonstrations. Just enough so that we can use our creativity and guided intuition to be able to assume new responsabilities, with enough guides and indicators learnt to see if we are going in the right direction or going to a fatal no-exit way. The encyclopedia also shows us a less frightening world because we know how things have large probabilities to occur (and science is all about maximizing the probabilities by collecting many comparable experiences). If things are not known, the encyclopedia should be able to tell it (until someone prooves the opposite by exposing new evidences an giving them to the world... by the enyclopedia and other free medias, not just text).

And the future of the encyclopedia must also use new medias. For now Commons collects them but does not expose them in an easily reusable form. collecting knowledge without sorting it serves no real purpose (well it's the same for systematic genealogic projects!) except building a giant stack of sand dust. An encyclopedia must be able to transform this stack into a structured building with tagged ways, corridors, doors and signages. And we want our travel in this building to be pleasant : we want to remove stupid accessibility barriers (including non-mutual understanding of languages). Wikiepdia will certainly benefit more than it does today, by using database resources from Wikidata (or similar).

Wikispecieis will probably migrate most of its content to Wikidata (and then Wikispecies will remain only as a nice presentation and navigation site in its domain). More domains of studies could go to that way, an may be instead of having only one Wikipedia with a single interface for exverything we will have dedicated sites for specific domains : our Wikiprojects currrently hosted by portals on Wikipedia could become new separate projects, sharing lot of data with other projects (Wikidata will help creating the necessary ontologies to make this possible). And Wikiepdia will also be more "social" by becoming a more universal portal with personalmized gadgets freely movable on pages, with lots of UI customizations. It will also have to better integrate the various lingusitic editions (possibly by mixing them where appropriate with "boxes" chosen by users according to their own navigation profile, personnality or their own management and scheduling of time (leisure, work, studies).

Wikipedia should also be easier to contribute by creating smaller blocks in a more interactive ways. It should be also integrable on existing social networks. The time to create content by editing Wikitext shoudl be over: Wikipedia will probably abandon its existing "wiki" form to become more dynamic. But giants steps remain to cross to add this flexibility to Wikipedia. In fine, the existing content will be converted into another more usable/editable format and the old wiki syntax (and damned templates!) will be forgotten (they are not really the goal of Wikipedia, they were just a tool to make Wikipedia possible with its existing form, but we all know that Wikipedia is not easy to use an reuse and that it requires enormouse energy and maintenance time to make it work : we still cannot use the power of grid computing and clouds, Wikiepdia sould be come an interface to connect us to many open content resources, and trade them dynamically, i.e. an agregator of open/free contents, with collections maintained by volunteers helping just to sort and structure them; and edit conflits will be over because Wikipedia will be open to many content forks). But May be Wikipedia just wants to become a new internet ? Will there be a possible life on the internet if we are not on Wikipedia ?

Finally beware of competitors : Facebook notably wants to take massive knowledge and become the single provider of this content. It has already started to create its own view of what could be an "encylopedia" (except that it will be severely protected and if users want more, they'll have to pay for that or accept to be spammed by ads and invitations from many fake users (created by Facebook itself only to promote its business and simulate social interactions. verdy_p (talk) 05:06, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

More editors? Stop to drive off the ones you still have.

Stop the nice rehtorics about the mission. Start thinking about the last catastrophes the foundation brought over the project, examples of those are:

• visual editor
• media viewer

Start thinking about telling people what yor really use those millions of fundraising money for. This includes asking the question why there is a three-digit-number of employees, and what they are doing. Yes, I'm angry. But I think it's my right. I've been contributing, mainly to dewiki, since Nov. 2002, because of conviction about the mission to build a free encyclopedia. People have a right to know if this is still the foundation's mission, or if there are too many sinecure positions in the foundation. --193.18.240.18 09:17, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Towards a next generation Wikipedia

Your analysis of the problem seems correct but your proposed solution IMHO does not address its main causes. Having followed the project for over a decade I see a significant shift in the way edits are received by the Wikipedia community. I see this as a direct result of the increasing completion of the projects main goal. Because an increasing number of topics is covered with ever more in depth information, Wikipedia is getting more concerned with deleting than with adding information. The history is there but does not provide any (user friendly) means to track changes of specific pieces of information in an article.

I think, Wikipedia's main problem is its focus on the article as an atom. In longer articles this leads to redundant information added by editors who apparently did not read the whole text, increasing the size of the article even more. But it also creates problems with editors who perceive an article as their brainchild and fend of editors introducing unwanted information.

To solve these and other problems, a Wikipedia 2.0 should move away from the article as an atom to a smaller entity. Create a database of individual pieces of information no longer than 50 to 70 words (350 to 500 characters) which are credited to their respective authors and immutable as soon as they are accepted into the system, have this information peer reviewed before it is entered into the main database and have it systematically tagged. Articles would then be created on demand from this information, giving users the opportunity to create individual articles on the same topic, catered for their specific interests. Thus you could read an article e.g. about the moon, covering its physical aspects, and another one on its mythology or about its reception in history. All these articles could provide more in depth information without introducing redundancy and, at the same time, be shorter than a generic text on its topic.

As a non-native English speaker I also contend that the Wikipedia internationalization was a mistake, or better, the way it was performed. IMHO true internationalization is not translating everything into hundreds of languages but giving people the opportunity to read and, in a second step, to write a common language. When Wikipedia was first internationalized the options were more limited but with standardized dynamic HTML elements it is possible to offer translation aids on the fly while browsing a text. What I have in mind are not simple translations of words but phrases which take into account the context a word appears in. Of course this does not exclude the provision of separate spaces with information of local interest in different locations. --BerlinSight (talk) 15:10, 7 January 2015 (UTC)