Consumerium development 20 years on

The motivation why we need this kind of system remains the same. Many of the features have been implemented by others. There is still much to be done.

mw:MediaWiki software has been developed very actively for over 20 yrs and it is vastly more powerful in its capabilities now. It's capabilities can be expanded with MediaWiki/extensions, but one needs to choose carefully and wisely as some permutations of extensions do not work together and some extensions may be difficult to remove after having been installed.

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

~ w:Søren Kierkegaard

Many of the planned features have already been implemented as services by both profit-maximizing and non-profit-seeking entities during these past 20 years.

PLANNING for the future

• Knowledge graphs consisting of linked data are a complicated field, but necessary for realizing the Consumerium goals.
• The need to handle conflicting data from alternate data sources arises from using other knowledge graphs.
• mw:Extension:Cargo allows storing and querying structured data in wiki
• mw:Extension:Wikibase is what powers Wikidata.
• The test wiki could be reinstalled clean to the latest LTS and Cargo installed on it. Or many test wikis could be set up
• kuluttajistow:Etusivu - a Finnish language wiki for Finnish Consumerium at the domain Kuluttajisto.fi

Developments elsewhere

• Open Food Facts is doing a great job at crowdsourcing food product information.
• w:Solid (web decentralization project) seems very aligned in what it is trying to do and will probably succeed. Give the ownership of the data to the people and make the corporations play nice that way.

Needs freshening up

• The features should be updated to as of now and to include what existing services implement some feature, or even better, what friendly data source provides the data with a licensing setup that we can work with.
• The MediaWiki/extensions was an attempt at going through all the extensions and scribing up the potential ones. I did this in 2012, so 10 yrs ago and revisiting these extensions would be useful and educating.

Analytics

The top 20 articles in the main namespace measured by the number of visits for the year 2022 have been the following:

1. Lists of review aggregators and review sites
2. Unequal power relationship
3. Main Page
4. Individual bias
5. Lists of price comparison services
6. Lists of alternative financial services
7. Consumer terminal
8. Political dispute
9. Subject-object problem
10. Ontological warfare
11. Price premium
12. Trollism
13. Contested term
14. Lists of shared and alternative transport and traveler routers
15. Systematic bias
16. Ecological lens
17. Humptydumptyism
18. Develop Wiki
19. Knowledge graphs
20. Intrawiki link

HISTORY

See Timeline of Consumerium for info on what has happened during these years that has been significant for the development effort.

Goals and means of Consumerium is the oldest mission statement document of the Consumerium.org effort from ca. 2001-2002.

User:Jukeboksi/log/All Consumerium logs in one may also be useful viewing, at least for me, the Lowest Troll

THE CURRENT STATE

Uncontested facts: Today is Sunday 30 March 2025 and it is week #13.

The wiki has 4,274 pages out of which 1,173 are articles with 51,095 edits, but would be structured differently if all the technological means and savoir faire of now would have been available when we started out with a handful of friends.

There are 36 uploaded files but through mw:Manual:$wgUseInstantCommons many more pictures are available to be used.

There are 68,093 registered users, which is bit of a problem, because over 64k of those are bot registered accounts from back in the day

There are 4 admins. You know who you are.

Today the wiki is running on mw:MediaWiki 1.43.0 (fc1759b).

The Consumerium development wiki turned 20 on Friday 2023-02-24 Fri Feb 24 2023 00:52:00 GMT +0000. and the motivation for Consumerium remained the same.

Thank yous

Thank yous for tech

• 
  w:GNU's Not Unix..
• 
  .. but it has always helped w:Linux to be.
• 
  Relying on MediaWiki to work towards the Consumerium goals since 2003.
• 
  Consumerium has been relying on copyleft w:Debian GNU/Linux Stable-branch servers since Debian Squeeze. Debian is also Juho's choice for everyday OS.
• 
  w:Apache HTTP Server has served Consumerium well for over 15 yrs. Consumium free social runs w:Nginx a very nice copyleft web server.
• 
  Choice of RDBMS is w:MariaDB, a fork back by the original people behind MySQL.
• 
  Matomo - Matomo.org is a free and open source w:web analytics application originating from w:New Zealand