Content Wiki

What is the Content Wiki?

Content Wiki is where facts on products and companies and such will be stored when it gets built. Facts require more discipline than opinion wiki comments. When we say "fact" we mean instructional capital that all factions accept as "true" at least to the degree it is allowed to alter the Consumerium buying signall.

The Consumerium Governance Organization and its delegated sysops will have to decide on what grounds each type of information is input, audited, linked, shared, duplicated, edited, contested, vetoed and removed and by whom.

Opinions (ie. Campaigns and split articles on aspects where factions do not agree) go to Opinion Wiki when it gets built.

This page is not for actual content (i.e. do not attempt to classify CIV or Gus Kouwenhoven or what they are doing on this page) but for developing the syntax and governance of the Content Wiki so we can set one up.

Wiki software

To fork or not to fork that is the question. Which of the wiki code alternatives to use? It is natural to presume that the wiki software will be either:

MediaWiki unmodified
MediaWiki modified
A fork of MediaWiki
TikiWiki unmodified
TikiWiki modified
A fork of TikiWiki
MoinMoinWiki extended
something else supporting ConsuML

Which one of these alternatives makes sense is an open question. A Wikitext standard would help. Metaweb is already on it.

The relationship between Wiki and ConsuML information

Data stored as ConsuML documents could be used to generate stubs into the wiki on-demand
The parsing process goes the following way ConsuML data will be parsed to Wiki code in the appropriate natural language for each wiki, which then in turn will be parsed to HTML for the Consumer
The autogenerated protions will be enclosed with special tags such as <autogenerated></autogenerated>
Messing with the autogenerated portions manually better be justified

The ConsuML will act as a glue between The Consumerium Exchange and the Content Wiki. ConsuML will be used to verify what corresponds to what within The Exchange and between The Exchange and The Wiki

Wiki Syntax

If a modified version will be used it makes sense to use many more namespaces to make the wiki more manageable, but on the other hand using standard MediaWiki has many advantages. Using unmodified MediaWiki would just require stricter syntax within the articles

According to MediaWiki developers adding numerous namespaces is easy so here is a brief and uncomplete list of likely namespaces:

We need to start forming templates to advance the launch of the Content Wiki:

Article Structure

The Wiki approach and the original vision can be brought closer by using strictly named subarticles that are then collated into a viewable document on-demand for the consumer based on her/his preferences

Advantages include:

Consumer can specify what information s/he wishes to view and in what order in each case
Good for internationalization since translation can progress subarticle-by-subarticle
Finer grained version control and approvance (signatures)
Performance gains over monolithic articles (?)
Good for maintaining historical information
Editors know where to find the portions they have most knowledge of
Useful for efficiently mixing autogenerated portions with manually edited ones
Less Wiki Veteran Annoyance due to quicker comprehension of small separate syntax guides instead of one big lump of do's and dont's

Depending on the type of article there are varying needs of:

Mandatory subarticles
Optional subarticles

When thinking about companies an outline of subarticle structure might be something like

Company X - containing product groups, brands, products etc.
Company X/ids (mandatory) - registered names, national registry numbers, d-u-n-s, stock symbols etc.
Company X/economy - subpaging further like Company X/economy/2003Q4
Company X/history
Company X/affiliated businesses
Company X/executives
Company X/advertising
Company X/labor practices
Company X/workplace upgrade requests
...

Governance

We need a summarum of the currently existing Wiki Governance Practices here and study each one and the resulting model that we will use will likely be a synthesis of numerous existing models. Probably best to discuss at Metaweb where big geeks are. Also track Meta's power structure debates.

Writing explicit retail price information is not allowed in The Content Wiki. What is allowed is to make remarks that Company X's (say some retail-chain in some country) pricing policy for product groups differs from market averages in one direction or the other.

See:

Interaction between other wikis containing related content?

Background: There is already information on companies, brands, labels and such in Wikipedia and Disinfopedia.

How to avoid redundant copy-pasting between wikis?
How will the recording of information be coordinated to benefit the consumer in her/his search for knowldge on offered products?
The obivious thing that comes to mind would be to build an interwiki watchlist type of utility that would enable tracking changes to articles with matching article names across multiple wikis. This would most likely interest the editors of all the involved wikis.