If John decides this isn’t erudite E-nuff for Meta, could some mod move it to General.

E-neeway I thought a bit of naïveté might help generate some contributions CALMwise

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=12014&st=40



Unfit for purpose or Unfit purpose

In Wikipedia’s case both conditions are probably true. The meshing of wiki software with J.Wales’ half conceived ambitions was little more than a marriage of convenience, and was most certainly not an explicit design decision. What the Wiki mythologists have presented as a happy serendipity looks increasing like design redundancy as Wikipedia takes on an ever more tired appearance when compared to the rest of the Interweb.

Proposition (1): The primary sensory advantage of the internet is that it can deliver ‘visual’ communication.

Consequence for communication projects: Whilst text is (for most people) accessed visually, text is a very limited part of the spectrum of visual communication employed by human beings, yet Wiki as used by Wikipedia participants is essentially a text manipulation tool. Wiki has proved effective in the production of millions of lines of text, but text is a very poor ‘stand alone’ medium for effective communication.

Consequence for Wikipedia: Wikipedia has been successful in attracting contributors who value text, who are adept at deriving information from text and who wish to create text, the Wikipedia model is essentially one of word creation as a defining objective, without any broader reference to communication – including ‘learning’. Text creation in Wikipedia is presented as being of itself ‘communication’, yet graphical presentation which is essential to ‘illustrate’ text is available only in limited and static form on Wikipedia. Even in this limited use, text is used to illuminate the graphic content rather than graphics being used to illuminate the text. This reversal of the opportunity provided by the medium (internet) for expansive graphical communication has accentuated a split between text and graphic in Wikipedia, where graphics (primarily photographs) are iconised in lists (Wikimedia Commons) compiled separately from the creation of text, in a process of emulation of dead tree publishings ‘image libraries’. On Wikipedia, when ‘imported’ to illustrate the ‘encyclopaedia’ these images frequently stand as distractive and/or pornographic because they are disjuncted from the primary function of text creation predicated by the Wiki software.

Proposition (2): A project, the aim of which is to use the internet to achieve communication, including learning functions, where the intention is to optimise the available communicational capacity, would be structured around the application of visual facility.

Consequence for communication projects: Maximising visual facility would require easy translation of text/number to graphical representation. Graphics such as charts and graphs are readily translated from text/number and such translation can be made available on an interactive basis. More complex graphics, video, photographs, drawings etc can be given enhanced interactivity be providing the viewer with controls over perspective, 360 degree rendering etc.

Implications for ‘a future encyclopaedia’: Existing net based encyclopaedias have done little more than reproduce ‘dead tree’ models in digitised format. A ‘future encyclopaedia’ making full use of available technological resources would be essentially interactive and visually/graphically driven. The editing of such a project, whether or not participatory, would likely be most effectively achieved through software which emulates the end user interactive function where graphic and text manipulation is part of a single process. Both creator/editor, and end user would be facilitated to generate page/tab/article versions, in the case of the end user these versions would be limited to their own work space, but the operative software would be common to creator/editor and user.

A.virosa

You underestimate the central role of text in the kind of projects you describe. Text lends itself to "collaboration" including the deformed type practiced on WP, in a way that images, video, sound and scratch-n-snifferific content could begin to approach.

The lesson of Web 2.0 is that the chief advantage of the internet is with searchable text and the willingness of participants to contribute text based atomized content.

Now see what you made me do …

Jon

So that would lead to a further proposition: “That the internet does not currently provide the tools/environment to support the creation of a non large scale collaborative project which facilitates learning through provision of multiple media/platforms which are not mediate by text, and that either novel tools/internet environments will need to be created, or a Future Encyclopaedia (i.e one that is structured on manipulable that images, video, sound and scratch-n-snifferific content) a) will remain practically unachievable through a crowd sourced approach.”

While I don’t see any hope for ‘crowd sourcing’ being in anyway useful for the development of ‘learning’ (however one defines learning as a quality or process) I fully expect Wiki’s and especially Wikipedia to eventually be shown as evolutionary ‘learning’ dead ends (nod Awbury re: power of evolution) I’m less sanguine about the long term tyranny of text, or rather, I’m more optimistic about the possibilities of increased use of manipulable and communicable imagery. Facebook, Youtube et al are fundamentally image communication platforms, where text has a subservient role, and even Twitter with its ‘contracted’ form of texting prefigures a diminution of the traditional text form. Not that I’m suggesting that Facebook or Youtube or Twitter are better models for a Future Encyclopaedia than are Wikis, that would be absurd, but the social network sites demonstrate that there is a large part of Internet use which is far more energised by communication with image than with text. One only needs to look at how youtube videos are used on WR as ‘rich shorthand’ for amusing ideas or as ‘emoticons in motion’. And even the humble smilie, an internet creation, is a ‘rich symbol’ providing a succinct replacement to the formal coding of lettered text. Again, I’m not suggesting a Future Encyclopaedia would be constructed around emoticons – merely that people are geared to use non text image as communication on the net, and this offers opportunities for ‘rich(er) learning’.

A.virosa

Amanita just about has me convinced that s/he's the result of a Recombinant DNA Experiment between Abd and Poet* gone serously awry.

Jon

Urmmm ? ? Is that good thing ?

A.virosa

We had fun doing it. Isn't that the standard?

The problem is that text is relatively cheap. 3D interactive graphics and multimedia is a lot more expensive to produce.
http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/

The advantage is that text is relatively cheap.

Talk being cheap, and text being basically talk.

Video editing is far easier than it used to be, and every fool has a camera phone now.

Text collaboration is still the easiest to set up and set rules for.

Managing expectations and then maintaining a friendly, structured environment for collaboration is the goal - and as we know, is very hard to scale if your site expands.

There a question of perspective here, both positions of text as 'advantage' and text as 'problem' are not positions evolving from a question such as "How would an internet based service or project, in which the intention is to optimise the available communicational capacity, including learning functions, be structured ?

Imaging (imagining) a future encyclopaedia (which was what I was trying to get at in this thread) can't be usefully constrained by current limitations - it's a question of asking what could be done given the availability of greater resource. Of course one could go into the realms of scifi fantasy, which I sought to limit by referencing JA's: "and start e-visioning what the post-Sanger-Wales era in Computer-Aided Learning Media (CALM) ought to look like", so essentially the question is "what would a future encylcopaedia look like given the use of the best/most useful/effective tools currenly available ?

That text is cheap and easy to facilitate is undoubtedly true, but if it doesn't deliver the best learning opportunites, why keep focussing on it in contexts where learning is the imperitive.

A.virosa

I'll repeat text is cheap. All it takes is person-power to cut&paste stuff from EB1911 and C19 books. Creating multimedia is far more complex and requires additional skills. The Theban Mapping Project is one such. This on evolution and DNA etc is another example (try out the cell function stuff too).

http://www.johnkyrk.com/evolution.swf


In both cases they require skilled input you can't expect to find many 15yo capable of doing either, or take this video:
http://www.factum-arte.com/eng/conservacio...ankhamun_en.asp

EDIT: I'll add this little one in to the mix as well
http://www.factum-arte.com/eng/conservacio...esi/default.asp

The costs are incredible high and there are few people in world capable of creating such it needs real money and real expertise.

I think a multi-media encyclopedia that would be better than Wikipedia would be as follows:

(1) Paid staff oversee all content that greets the public eye, although "the crowd" could contribute content from behind the main scenes.

(2) Address simultaneously versions of articles that are appropriate for children under 10 years old, children from 10-18, and for adults.

(3) In addition to text and pictures, offer a narrative voiceover of the text and both still picture and motion video imagery in a "polished" finished form. I.e., someone with talent reading the script, with accompanying images and videos to support what is being read. Many people want the "History Channel version" of an encyclopedia article, rather than to read the text with their own eyes.

Sanger's kind of on to this with WatchKnow.

Hope springs eternal and all, but, realistically speaking, I sincerely doubt if Sanger will ever be part of the solution — he's been too big a part of the problem to ever, most likely, be capable of seeing that.

But just keep focusing on the distractors … of knowledge's secondary sex characteristics, so to speak … and one day you'll wake up and wonder what happened … to the life of inquiry that created it all.

Jon