Wednesday, July 09, 2008

The Wikipedic Wars - Proposal 1.x for the Wikiprojects



Proposal 1.x & Some Comments


* I was asked to come here, so I came. I think that as Wikiproject council members, we are concerned on how to help the Wikiprojects reach their goals; for the most part, they seem to be working or flowing rather well. As it is natural there are some issues pending. Wikipedia is a system, and itself is a project and so it is the "mother of all Wikiprojects". So my proposal should be stated primarily as a suggestion no more than that. Here find it below in the following lines:

1. Project statement: To create a graphical, navigational, and taxonomic hierarchical representation of all Wikiprojects, highly extensible, easy to inspect, understand and interact with. Thus, the members of the Wikiproject council, and other users as well, could determine which Wikiprojects should be tagged or not and more importantly could facilitate the work flow of the Wikiprojects.

2. "Terms" or entries or articles are already partially belong to this system, e.g., Colombia has its Wikiproject but it is part of the Latin-American Wikiproject, and son on other countries or continents. There is a jurisdictional hierarchy in all this, and by classifying the complexity; many rework, waste and redundancy can be dramatically reduced by simply mapping those "pipes" or connections within all Wikiprojects for determining what belongs to what Wikiproject. For subjects such a Hard Sciences, I do not see too much of a problem, but Social or Soft-Sciences, can be a little bit more complicated or tricky, including political, religious and other controversial subjects. Anyways, we are doing it already with the categories and navigational boxes. Perhaps it is time to consider using something like it for the Wikiprojects to see the inter-dependencies, overlapping and co-dependencies of the subjects in question and in the context of their contents.

3. Perhaps evenly the scope of what a Wikiproject should be and how they are built or organized should be redefined a little bit too. SMEs [Subject Matter Experts] are sometimes too close into one or other side of the topic. Precisely they sometimes represent an impingement that could increase significantly the encyclopedic workload. A Wikiproject Work flow gets better when they are users genuinely interested in learning from all POVs. Incidentally, an encyclopedic knowledge has more to do with integration than with specialization. Project Managers, for instance, in NASA or other technology-based organizations, are mostly generalists as they are in charge of the project portfolio management, as the engineers or Business analysts or 'c' level executives are not. We should consider this a little more, I noticed certain individuals that become very or extraordinary attached, possessive and territorial about an article and this have discouraged a number of academic and important users. It seems that for some human condition mostly gangs-alike groups are formed, sometimes sponsored by organizations as it was already discovered by the Wikiscanner more than a year ago. So they are exo-patrolling the Wikiprojects and content, precisely because their are getting paid for doing so, i.e., representing the special interests of their institutions or patrons. So they end up monopolizing and making all the decisions of projects sometimes, according to their views and needs thereof. I do not see anything wrong in it only that is not encyclopedic or evenly Wikipedic, let alone fair.

4. Lastly, Wikiprojects, could be understood as the set of pages, interested organizations and individuals, time and other resources that are consumed to managed one or more related topics about a specific area of knowledge. In case of the subordination or sub-categorization, Wikiprojects could use a taxonomic object orientation to determine classes and subclasses as stated above.

5. In closing, I think that this conversation is very important. I understand as well that Wikipedia has reached high levels of knowledge organization already; this is difficult to improve. Perhaps, we all could recognize that what we, all, are looking at, in here, I should state in IMHO, is how to increase or improve the maturity level of our Wikiprojects capabilities. Now, no question, we will do it, but before we need to refocus on how we will do some tuning and re-sharpening in/for every Wikilife-cycle, meaning it is a continuum, this is the WikiWay, I guess. Well, perhaps somebody will follow up with this, just let me know, if you can. However, Wikipedia is great! Good spirits, I would like to write for you, what Victor Hugo told Grant, "The stars are yours", I really think so. John M. Kennedy T. 00:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

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