Consumerium plans as of 2013

Technology especially FOSS ( Free and Open Source Software ) has a key role in making the Consumium goals possible. A lot has changed since 2002/2003, the means are here at reach to make Consumium work in the real world. lot of the information described in the Goals and means of the Consumerium project is available from DBpedia w:ontology and w:datasets ( from categories and from infoboxen ).

The most computer resources in the original plans were the means to serve the Advertisement Videos but today those can be embedded into wiki from youtube.com so that's taken care of and we require zero investent to enable serving videos.

The most human resources demanding was the entering of the Business and Product data but with the emergence of DBpedia we can have extensive datas on 40,000+ businesses fully automatically and many many other entities/articles.

The licensing issue of whether to go with GFDL + CC-A-SA double licensing or just one of them needs to be well thought out and solved.

In Spring 2012 the decision was made to change the name of the effort from Consumerium to Consumium

Consumium wiki structure is much in a state of change at the moment, but the current design plan is to serve all languages from a single wiki much like Translatewiki is doing and to have a second wiki for file uploads ( like the commons ) and to use Single-signon with the two wikis, so that the user accounts are global.. With the coming of the Universal Language Selector we will likely adopt the form of /wiki/Article_name_in_English/fi instead of /wiki/fi/Artikkelin_nimi_suomeksi.

Developers needed

Template designers to design templates obviously, Mediawiki extension programmers to implement voting system and feedback delivery system

Licensing

I think Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License is a natural choice but I'm not sure. Surely it would make little sense to license the votes so keep them copyright of the user i.e. have the templates used for quick voting will be under CC-A-SA but the actual votes are not under GFDL or CC-A-SA.. Right ? This can be done by loading a dump into a temp database and deleting everything in the User-namespace and redumping.

Changing the name of the effort from Consumerium to Consumium

The Lowest Troll has unilaterally decided it's better to drop the letters "er" to arrive at the effort being named Consumium, instead of Consumerium and has registerd the domain http://consumium.org to be used for the Implementation Wiki meanwhile the Development Wiki ( this wiki ) may remain at it's usual http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/ address or be moved to develop.consumium.org , this is an open question of low urgency and importance.

What kind of information Consumerium / Consumium plans to offer consumers on businesses?

Name ( from DBpedia )
HQ location - ( from DBpedia )
Type (Types of companies) which evolved to w:en:Types of business entity ( from DBpedia )
Size range (activity) <single location vendor>, <small and medium domestic>, <large domestic>, <international> <transnational> (operates on 3 or more continents.) from categories in Wikipedia and Consumium, see w:MNC w:Multi national corporation, these are <international> at minimum and many are <transnational>s
Size range (vested capital/assets ( from DBpedia ) comparisioned against the industry average and/or nominal and/or stockvalue ( from where ##economics gets them ) shown delayed) if a public corporation)
Employability ( years of employment provided / Million € of vested capital ) and other Consumerium:Metrics
Payments Per Investment
Link to their feedback page (or shoutbox or such as)
Their toll-free number (or a toll number if no toll-free line is supplied

These last two will have to be recorded on a per w:locale basis obviously for which there are MediaWiki/extensions ( such as LandingCheck and MediaWiki/widgets ( such as the upcoming MediaWiki/widgets#Universal Language Selector to automize the process of displaying the info for the locale the Consumer is in according to her/his browser.

What else...

Consumium wiki structure

The old plans called for having two wikis either Research Wiki and Publish Wiki ( suggested by the trolls, focus on distinction of researchable stuff from publishable stuff ) or Content Wiki and Opinion Wiki ( suggested by User:Juxo, effort founder, focus on isolation of factual content from subjective opinions ) but currently it looks like those plans are scrapped in favor of having only one Implementation Wiki to minimize governmental overhead. The voting pages of users will be copyright of the page owner i.e. not copylefted and not included in the dumps for forking. The voting pages of users will be NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW to stop them from getting included in search engine results. Likely the talk-namespace will be NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW so that the talk-pages of articles will be the research side of it and the actual main-namespace articles will be the publish side of it

The upcoming MediaWiki/widgets#Universal Language Selector conforms to the MediaWiki style of having the language code coming after the article, not before it, though our method would be navigationally perhaps better.

Primary structure

consumium.org/wiki/fi- Finnish langauge article space
consumium.org/wiki/en - English language article space
consumium.org/wiki/sv - Swedish language article space

(these are all the languages that I'm fluent enough to sysop)

Ideas about using sub-articles extensively to avoid massive disambig collision

consumium.org/wiki/en/Company/Brand/Product- For big corporations

consumium.org/wiki/en/Company/Feedback - for storing the feedbacks sent to the company via web-form or phone

consumium.org/wiki/en/Company/Brand/Product/Reviews reviews of the product

consumium.org/wiki/en/Company/Product - For smaller companies

consumium.org/wiki/en/Product - a redirect to Company/Brand/Product if Product name is not a company name

consumium.org/wiki/en/Country/City/District/Business (for businesses that have a few or one outlet(s))

Sub-articleing vs. extensive and heavy use of categories

Not sure if sub-articleing is a good idea. using mediawiki's categories and/or namespaces instead to provide structures. Having subarticleing will affect search engine scoring differently from using categories. The idea to use subarticleing spans from 2005 and earlier as it was easy to implement automatical linking by listing all subpages and is perhaps not valid approach anymore

MediaWiki extensions

See MediaWiki/Extensions for a newer list of potential implementation phase extensions.

Extension:Data In this extension data is described by item/key/value triplets, where 'item' is typically the name of the article, 'key' the name of the data, and 'value' the actual data. Here is an example of Extension:Data in action great stuff
Language extesion - this is really excellent. it allows to have multi-lingual pages. Must learn more about this mysterious and evasive extension - it's not listed in mediawiki.org extension matrix - also changes the language of the mediawiki navigation
Extension:SpamBlacklist - regexes against spammers - installed and working.
Extension:ConfirmEdit - installed and working.
~~Extension:VisualMathCaptcha~~ strike this - supports only MediaWiki 1.16 and below - anti-bot measure. See CAPTCHA if you don't know what it is

Images via $wgForeignFileRepos

We can have Company logos etc. from Wikimedia Commons, no need to upload a gazillion logos just for use in Consumerium. See Commons images for "Coca Cola" or logos of companies in Quebec etc.

from wm-bot: InstantCommons is a feature for MediaWiki 1.16+ that allows any MediaWiki installation to use media on the Wikimedia Commons. This has basically been realized via $wgForeignFileRepos. See <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgForeignFileRepos>. If you're only looking to use images from Wikimedia Commons and no other wikis, you can use the shortcut setting $wgUseInstantCommons to true.

Using Youtube to serve videos

Ads and Anti-ads can be served from Youtube to mobile or desktop devices using the Youtube-widget.