Next 10 Years of Wikipedia

Brion's notes

 * [jamesf] it took until about 2003-2004 for WP to move from aspirational to really being a useful encyclopedia. now we're pretty darn good. what's our new aspirations that will be made real?
 * [msnow] have we lost some of the original ideals of openness etc? have our additions made it too complicated? will things like wysiwig help restore the openness and easyness from the early days while keeping the upward motion of awesomeness?
 * think about what the user experience might look like in 10 years -- what can we move towards that might be very different?
 * 'wikipedia articles are kind of like school -- you read it but then it's gone. can we embed some forms of reinforcement? something to ping you with reminders, hit you from multiple methods?'
 * 'is that solved by letting it be self-directed? people are interested in what they're reading'
 * [jamesf] we have tools that remember what you edited, but not what you read. can we change that?
 * [brion] in past we've rejected that kind of data storage for privacy reasons, but there may be a middle ground that makes things possible but isn't so lax. new ways of interacting with the data?
 * [danese] beware of opt-in: people click on all kinda of scary things
 * [erik] on other interaction styles: we may need to make choices on whether we want to be in different interaction-style spaces (q&a etc)
 * a quora test copying some hot unanswered questions to wikipedia ref desk was actually very successful, if scary :D
 * [jason cook] data-oriented apis for searching without dealing with downloading your own dump?
 * queriable interfaces and things?
 * moving the metaweb-like things into the integrated wiki* world?
 * [jon] arbitrary divisions on the user communities are a problem: wikiprojects on enwiki vs commons, all separated and hard to work together
 * (inquiry about SUL cross-project recentchanges; there's a new toolserver thingy for it!)
 * thinking about the non-wikipedia projects? strategy project was heavily wp-centric
 * "what does knowledge represent?" -- do we need to move into other even newer areas?
 * danger of us asking it: echo chamber effect in a context of a popular existing project
 * thinking about other kinds of software -- wysiwyg & sentence-level editors as examples of current experimentation
 * LOTS of interest in etherpad-like collab editing
 * compared to tools like pending changes -- can we get these things iterated more quickly so we don't spend too much time going down the wrong track?
 * [jason cook] ex. testing on wikia tends to start on smaller projects and roll out more widely over time.
 * [phoebe] do we need to reconceive the structure of articles ? what are those bits?
 * [brion] structure yessss
 * [] but that structure has been organically created which is AWESOME
 * [brion] totally! but if some of that structure fits the machine better, we think we can be even MORE awesome without restricting useful abilities
 * [pete] there's always a tension between innovation and standardization: a scary template exists because someone tried to solve the problem of making a cool thing for users. irritating to editors, great to readers: let's find a way to then move on to the next step and standardize the innovation -- make it more broadly usable, documented, easier to work with.
 * [jorm] neat tool ideas -- let's use data internally: filtering to recognize edits that are likely to be reverted and make nice suggestions to the user
 * don't forget there's a huge community -- sooo many people are also thinking about these things, and that's awesome!)