Are there any political wikis that have systematically created stub pages?

[arendt]

(I am cross-posting this to the "Website, DB, & Software Developers" group, and the "Activist HQ".)

The question in the title came to me from reading an interesting paper in PLoS (Public Library of Science), about how to obtain positive-feedback in a topic-centered wiki. Here are the relevant excerpts:

In principle, a comprehensive (topic) wiki could have naturally evolved out of the existing Wikipedia framework... However, we hypothesized that growth could be greatly accelerated by systematic creation of page stubs, each of which would contain a basal level of (topic) annotation harvested from authoritative sources. Here we describe an effort to automatically create such a foundation for a comprehensive (topic) wiki. Moreover, we demonstrate that this effort has begun the positive-feedback loop between readers, contributors, and page utility, which will promote its long-term success.

...we developed a computer program to generate page stubs in automated fashion. (The program was developed using the Java programming language, and source code can be seen at: http://code.google.com/p/protein-box-bot/source/browse/#svn/ProteinBoxBot/src/proteinboxbot)

For the 650 pages that were previously existing and amended in this effort, we found that the edit rates were roughly equal when comparing activity both before and after our automated efforts. Among the 7,500 new stubs created, edit rates were on average 10-fold less than for the pre-existing pages. However, due to the substantial difference in size of these groups, approximately 50% of all edits to (this category of) pages were made on the newly created pages. These results demonstrate that in terms of the absolute number of edits, this effort roughly doubled the amount of annotation activity(in this category) in Wikipedia.

As another indication of the current and potential impact of these gene pages, we examined the ranking of these pages by the search engine Google. When searching by gene symbol, over 60% of this category of pages at Wikipedia are listed in the first page of hits.

The existence of scale-free properties in the Wikipedia gene network has at least two implications. First, scale-free networks are known to have a small network diameter (represented by the shortest path between any two concepts), suggesting that the Wikipedia network facilitates the efficient “browsing” of related topics in the local neighborhood.

As alluded to previously, the success of this wiki effort relies on a positive-feedback loop between page utility, the number of readers, and the number of editors. It is commonly recognized that new wiki editors are more likely to edit an existing page rather than to create a new one. Therefore, this stub-creation effort represents the critical first step in that positive feedback loop—the creation of useful initial wiki pages. As suggested in Figure 2B, these stubs will attract some reasonable population of readers, a small fraction of whom will additionally edit and improve the page. It is then hoped and expected that this positive-feedback loop will become self-sustaining.

- J. Huss, et al. "A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function"

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175

This article struck a nerve with me.

I have been extremely frustrated by the minimal hyperlinking of the DU "database". The DU GUI, scrolling through what is effectively a gigantic table of contents (even with some kind of filter), is not state-of-the-art. It exposes no underlying structure or linkage to the corpus of posts, other than the arbitrary and externally-imposed "forum" or "topic" categories.

The conversations at DU are very one-dimensional, and the evolution of positions over time is hard to decipher (whereas, in a wiki, you can pull up the edit chain). Quite often, I feel like I am having the same argument for the 999th time. If there were a DU Wiki page, the arguments would either be settled or wind up flagged with one of those "this article is contested" flags. Also, wikis tend to marginalize one line comments - which clog DU threads like kudzu.

I feel that the behavior/feel of the site, which I just outlined, ghettoizes it as nothing more than a discussion board. I would like to see that change. So, I am speaking to people at DU who make things happen: activists and software developers.

My frustration is not with DU specifically. Kos is very difficult to get a grip on. It seems like a giant, flat database. The links are there, but there is no structure emerging from them. At least DU has topic forums.

The science guys cited above have shown that you can jump-start a topic wiki by providing a good set of stub pages. Perhaps, DU could widen its appeal and its authoritativeness by setting itself up as a wiki with a lot of well-vetted political info.

Does anyone here know of a leftwing political site organized in this manner? Does anyone want to take a crack at adopting the free software cited in the article above to our political context?



arendt

[arendt]

1. Oops. I'm not a donor, so I can't crosspost to the Website group. n/t

[arendt]

2. To answer my own question, dKosopedia is one such political wiki...

It IS navigable, I just don't appreciate why/how they chose their topics. But, I do like the ability to go directly to relevant reference material.

arendt