User talk:Yurik/I Dream of Content

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Implementation[edit]

I have also started writing the steps I think we need to achieve this dream (work in progress). --Yurik (talk) 18:17, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Endorsements[edit]

  • Support Support I think this is a compelling and challenging vision for refocusing our encyclopedia. Cscott (talk)
    The technical implementation could be quite challenging. If this vision was adopted we really ought to invest in a framework (or frameworks) for collaboratively creating and editing the sort of interactive content envisioned. That might even mean a full-scale hosted multiuser IDE for some sort of flash-like scripting environment. And similarly for 3d content, map content, big data archives, etc. And we'll have to archive all that rich content indefinitely, and ensure it remains functional even as the web platform continues to evolve. It would be a big expansion of scope and a big challenge -- but challenges are good!
  • Support Support I support this much beyond the obvious "why not, great idea!" kind of support. The sum of all knowledge is more than the sum of all static text and a few images. A few years ago I would've shuddered at the prospect of writing a collaborative editing environment in which people could craft a visualization of quantum entanglement. But today, seeing things like virtual reality in browsers, I'm afraid we're light years behind where we should be. Milimetric (WMF) (talk)
  • Support Support That's a dream worth dreaming. Sometimes we spend years to make more modest dreams a reality. It took almost ten years to adopt the Lilypond extension. At other times we move mountains in one season. It this foremost a technical challenge? Erik Zachte (talk) 20:53, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support I think it's very important that we work on tools for our contributors to go beyond 'text + images'. I will definitely be pushing us towards a more explicit support of forward-facing content tools, so we don't end up with more situations like dragging our feet on music score rendering for years... --brion (talk) 18:11, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support I'm strengthened in my opinion that we need to put more effort in these kinds of contributions after I had a chance to interact with some older encyclopedias this week. All of these volumes were sectioned by trade, with thorough descriptions and drawings of all the processes and build instructions for tools of the trade, all of them were used as textbooks, some carried the wording "dictionary", etc etc. We need to take a 'wider' view of content, knowledge and education, than the limitations we have imposed upon Wikipedia "because it's an encyclopedia". That doesn't mean we need to scrap WP:NOT, but I think we need to build a stronger web of connections between our various types of content, and make it easier to not just jump from topic to topic within the encyclopedia, but also to jump to different types of knowledge. We need to bring the people who work on those types of content closer together (to make them more efficient in creating this stuff), but without sandboxing those people into a sub community that doesn't talk to other parts of our movement. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:04, 26 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments[edit]

-- SPage (WMF) (talk) 08:46, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Funny you mention shared content and json -- I have already began writing how I see the path to implementation here (incomplete), and those were among the first steps. As for interactivity - I think all of wiki-verse would benefit eventually, but we could use smaller projects as the testing grounds. --Yurik (talk) 08:55, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It may make sense to separate things from Commons, depending on how interested the Commons admin community is in dealing with different types of content than they're used to. But definitely I think it makes sense to be able to a) pull things from a common source and b) have central tools for internationalization/localization. A common problem I see is diagrams (especially animated ones as GIFs) that are hard to internationalize or customize... we have some limited support for localizing text in SVGs but the user-friendly helper tools are hiding away, officially unsupported on tool-labs or such. And we've got *no* tools for animations other than playing them back. A good animated or interactive diagram (or larger such thing) is really a meta-object that may pull in graphics, text, and data from various sources (Commons for source photos or SVG backing layers; text labels and data for maps/graphs from Wikidata; and maps themselves via OSM etc). And it may also need code to pull it all together. I think we almost need more of a multi-file project-oriented toolset -- something more like GitHub than like Commons. Which brings us back to: Wikibooks needs better support for its multipage modules, etc etc. :) --brion (talk) 18:18, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

While this all sounds cool, I hope we don't forget about the 200+ million people in the world who have low vision. Screen readers have improved a lot, and will continue to improve, but any shift away from text content should keep them in mind. --KSmith (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think the proposal points to very relevant areas (active participation and discovery). The specifics such as interactive content and surfacing related content are also interesting but I was wondering if user participation was considered for the later. I've been always curious about the lack of facilities for users to collect all the interesting pieces of information that they found on Wikipedia (from pages to sentences or locations), not to mention combining them, sharing them or tracking how they content gets updated. I illustrated some time ago those concepts here, in case it is useful to add some more clarity. -- Pginer-WMF (talk) 13:32, 18 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds very cool indeed. For reference:

--Atlasowa (talk) 14:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Re: A book is better than a stack of pages[edit]

I disagree with most of this.

  • "Learning from Wikipedia should be as addictive and engaging as following friends on a social network. Science encyclopedias for children are a great example of a “streaming discovery”, where kids are presented with a narrative, rather than multiple unrelated exhibits. Similarly, Wikipedia readers should be enticed to view more information."
No, Wikipedia readers should be empowered to view more information. They shouldn't be manipulated. Learning from Wikipedia already is addictive and a “streaming discovery”, see xkcd. Wikipedia articles are not "multiple unrelated exhibits", it's a maze of human curated links! But Wikipedia shouldn't be modeled on "following friends on a social network" or "narratives" for kids. We are writing an encyclopedia, doh. --Atlasowa (talk) 15:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "There are many ways to tie multiple articles together. Links require an action by the user in order to be explored, and are not as engaging. In addition to links, we should pro-actively display additional related information, but in a non-distracting way."
No, this is patronizing readers. Who do you think you are? See for example Research_talk:Improving_link_coverage#Experimenting_on_the_Wikipedia_App. --Atlasowa (talk) 15:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Currently, desktop Wikipedia articles span the entire width of the screen, making them very hard to read. I believe the article space should be made narrower, and use the margin as a means to promote other content such as multimedia, articles, fun facts, and news."
No, Wikipedia articles are not space for promotion. Please go make a fork elsewhere for an addictive social-network-like Wikipedia with pro-active promotions and click-bait on the margins. Wikipedia wants to empower people by knowledge easily available at their fingertips. --Atlasowa (talk) 15:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Jupyter / ipynb notebooks?[edit]

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120697 might be along the same / similar lines to this :) YuviPanda (talk) 19:26, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Phet[edit]

The PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. For a long time they wrote all their simulations in Java, but they are currently in the process of converting them to HTML5/JavaScript. They are first and foremost an education project and they put a lot of thought into the educative quality of the works they produce and the ways they go about creating simulations for learners. Philosophically/conceptually I think there is a probably a lot we can learn from them in terms of helping to explore how, when, and what type questions about creating interactive learning media. They create really good simulations and they have learned to write some pretty darn good code as well. I am really impressed with their approach to convertin gsimulations to HTML5, especially in terms of their library development.

Small notice about animated GIFs[edit]

Constantly animated GIFs are extremely, extremely annoying! And here too. Even when there is one single non-stop animation, this can cause frustration. When there are three of them, and all are spinning in their rhythm and pace - it makes me so pissed that I bury the tab without even reading the text. Please add to your plan the opportunity to do so, that all this beauty was launched at the user's request, and most importantly - turned off. --Kaganer (talk) 23:44, 25 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree! We don't even support animated gifs in mediawiki - hence they just keep spinning :( --Yurik (talk) 04:23, 2 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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