Infinithree: Beyond the Wiki Encyclopedia

InfinithreeBeyond the Wiki Encyclopedia

Gordon Mohr@gojomo

#BiB11October 28, 2011

Reference Books

Alexa ‘Reach’

50% Google.com

15% Wikipedia.org

2% IMDB.com

1% StackOverflow.com, Answers.com

GoogleWhat is it?

• an index

How is it made?

• algorithmic digesting (collection/excerpting/ranking)• trained by engineers, QA, users• both precalculated and created-on-demand

And the representative textual artifacts are?

• medium-sized: ranked lists of links/snippets, by query• tiny: snippet excerpts, by query+URL

WikipediaWhat is it?

• an ‘encyclopedia’

How is it made?

• authored summaries in common voice• tens of thousands of contributors• precomposed

And the representative textual artifacts are?

• medium-to-long: articles by topic• tiny/small: abstracts, intro sentences, tables

Google: Issues

• Adversarial search: SEO & Content Mills The Spablum Menace

• Occlusion, Dilution, Duplication

Wikipedia: Issues

• ‘Active’ users peaked in 2007

• ‘Encyclopedic’ construed to exclude Deletionism

• Wearying ‘wikilawyering’

• Far from the ‘green field’ it was

So What?

The Theory...

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”

Richard Feynman, 1959

Thing Unknown...or thunk

Thunk CollectionWhat is it?

• disaggregated knowledge

How is it made?

• authored summaries in common voice• tens of thousands of contributors• precomposed

And the representative textual artifacts are?

• medium-sized: ranked lists of thunks• tiny: single thunks

∞ thunkpediathe sum of all human knowledge... that fits

Future

• trained & authored interrelationships

• fine calibration to the reader

• social reinforcements for contributors

• overview editing

∞ thunkpediapre-launch discussion at

http://infinithree.org

launching soon athttp://thunkpedia.org

for updates follow@thunkpedia