Metaweb:Meta-Metaweb/archive

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

I figured I would launch a separate page to begin archived discussion of Metaweb user interface topics. That way the Metaweb becomes self-documenting.

What follows is a very quick summary of things that have been discussed so far.

All of what I am about to write here is based on my (Neal's) interpretation of Danny's idea, and so anyone, including Danny, can jump in and disagree.

For the time being, we are trying to implement Metaweb functionality on the Wikipedia engine. A key difference between Metaweb and Wikipedia is that in Wikipedia there is a single article for each topic and that article is created collaboratively, but in Metaweb each contributor posts a different explanation of each topic and (later, once this functionality exists) the explanations are filtered so that a given user will be directed toward explanations that are likely to be satisfactory for them.

To make this work we have got to configure or cajole the Wikipedia engine into doing certain things for us. Barring that, someone has to do it manually:

--contributors ought to log in rather than posting stuff anonymously

--explanations should be attributed to whomever authored them

--an explanation, once posted, should not be editable by other users

--if there is more than one explanation of a given topic, then a user who clicks on a link to that topic should be presented with a list showing all available explanations.

Another thing worth keeping in mind is that, although this is starting out as an annotation site for a work of fiction (Quicksilver), that is really an arbitary seeding point. The objective is to make the thing generally useful. In selecting topics and writing explanations, contributors should avoid pegging things to the novel and aim for as much generality as possible, so that, for example, a person who comes to the Metaweb looking for an explanation of pendulum clocks will not be confronted by (to them) baffling and obscure references to the novel.

That's enough for now, I only wanted to get this started. I suggest that people slap links onto the bottom of this page and add pages containing their own thoughts. In particular Patrick has been very responsive in pointing out ways that some of the things mentioned above can be achieved by configuring the Wikipedia engine correctly or manually by a community of alert contributors.

--NS

Meta-Metaweb: Jeremy's thoughts

re use of page numbers (NS)

re discussions (NS) discussion format (Patrick)