Call for comment - Reputation and verification systems in Wiki's
My day job is analytics and mixed in with that is often a healthy dose of solution architecture.
Solution Architecture in this sense involves analyzing requirements and putting together the necessary technological and other components required in order to affect a solution.
It was from researching diverse technologies that I first bumped into blockchains in the first place and for most of my use-cases graphene based blockchains are a great fit.
There are a couple of glaring or slightly outside the box use-cases that I have been mulling over for the last while that I want to put out to the steemit community for comment.
For starters let’s take Wikipedia
Whenever I want to start researching a new topic I often start with Wikipedia…. Not that it’s authoritative, but because you can quickly get a broad set of related concepts, jargon and associated paraphernalia relating to the topic to delve into further.
Wikipedia amongst other things has a number of challenges:
- Funding appears to be an issue judging by the number of pleas for donations.
- More obscure topics are generally poorly covered.
- There are often notifications pointing to the fact that certain sections lack citation or other forms of corroboration.
Now when I look at just these three problems immediately the steem blockchain comes to mind.
Plugging steemit type functionality into the back end of Wikipedia would go a long way to incentivizing contributors to contribute to Wikipedia even on the most obscure of topics.
Bounty type functionality could be put in place for missing citations etc.
There are a number of challenges however and that’s where the steemit community and the wisdom of the crowd comes in.
The last thing one would want from Wikipedia is for it to become even more susceptible to poor content contribution.
With incentives in place, gaming of the system, spam etc. is likely to emerge quickly.
Therefore content quality verification and validation would become crucial.
A very robust reputation system would need to be in place with a number of gates for contributed content to pass before being accepted and rewarded.
Unlike steemit this would not necessarily be vote and steempower based as a highly distributed quality assurance mechanism would be required.
I have a couple of ideas in this regard but was wondering what fellow steemians think could work. Hence the call for comments.
I guess the other big question is, would a site like Wikipedia be open to being approached to become part of the steem ecosystem. Think what this could do for Steem and Wikipedia.
They probably would need to take a phased roll-out for any blockchain based incentives however this could simply be deployed to certain topics, measured and effectiveness assessed as functionality is exposed.
It is funny you bring this up ;) This is exactly the type of problem I am working on as next gen reputation on Steemit.
Perhaps something is in the air, but to be honest this has been bugging me since I first discovered steemit and thought of applying it to other use cases.
In the wiki's case if they kept a detailed audit trail they could probably use that as a foundation for a reputation/ verification system using historical track record. But what to do for new or obscure subject areas with new entrants... that is the question.
Thank you for posting @gavvet.
Excellent thoughts here....Steemit already has some content providers who are professional in their presentations and if bleujay understands correctly....this content would make its way into a sort of Steem.on.pedia, which would be accessible centralized content by category.
ie. @pickoum has Chess lessons....@titin has piano recitals...@steemswede gives film/music/whiskey reviews....and many others including this autumn the posts have had a plefora of Mushroom tutorials with @richman in mind.
Well done.
We could re-invent the wheel or perhaps plugging into an existing wheel would go faster
... and thus the creative birthing process gives us ... STEEMIPEDIA :)
I might think that the reverse scenario could be interesting. What can be learned from Wikipedia that could be used in Steemit. The overall quality of Wikipedia is quite high, while Steemit post quality is quite low.
It seem to be an inherent problem in the Blockchain how to validate users and still let them keep the anonymity that somehow is the foundation of the idea. I am in talk with the people behind the Alexandria project a block-chain based archive for artists and I also have to rise the concern about plagiarism and fraud at their forum. Could we learn from wikipedia about how to rectify lack of citation, bias and other problems. The fact that wikipedia do point out that citation is lacking is actually a quality-mark.
As @steevc says, I think that the culture of Wikipedia frowns upon paying contributors. It is the old academia dream that in play...
Thanks for the contribution...
Perhaps steemit is more lax on quality because its intent is to become a fully fledged social media site - as opposed to a fact repository.
I did notice that reputation is one of the benefits Wikipedia espouse when encouraging contributors to create an identity. Perhaps they could enhance contributors reputation scoring with performance of past contributions and citations tracked by blockchain?
If payment is an issue then rep tokens of sorts perhaps.
You can't of course compare the encyclopedia with the social network, but on a abstract level quality is still a concern (I guess) to make the Steemit platform grow.
I also agree that wikipedia could benefit from block-cahin technology. Rep tokens could be an answer to some of their problems with attracting the real experts. Universities could be asked to vote, vouch for or even issue such tokens. So that is definitely a good idea. Blockchain and P2P could also help in hosting the database and distribute the traffic.
It would still be a long way from here, but if somebody would try to implement it as an experiment it could be a start. All content on the wikipedia is creative commons so it is really doable.
I will have to add to this a real problem that wikipedia is having.
Feminists! Feminists have offered bounties for adding feminist literature into citations. And, they are there. Like the 77 cents for every dollar that won't go away no matter how many times its disproven.
Feminists are a large group, with a large supporting. So, if there was ever any kind of democratic voting, they are likely to win. Facts do not seem to matter to this demographic. Perception is far more important.
What will happen as things get more fired up is that the feminists would soon control wikipedia. (its happened elsewhere) And then, the group that wants an honest, factual encyclopaedia will have to start again, somewhere else.
So, there has to be a something from the get go that allows for the banning of destabilizing forces. One way this could come into play is that a poster gets enough votes that they are a troll, then their comments get put into the troll category. Trolls see it, and non trolls don't.
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WOW @gavvet! What incredible ideas you have.
I think that any step forward would be great for a site, so I do not see why Wikipedia would not at least consider it.
I guess if Wiki is interested in security and verification of what gets done to their site it should be of interest to them.
Upvoted and resteemed!!
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