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10xers / 2015

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Adaptive wikipedia variant / learning #6

Open MatthewJWalls opened 9 years ago

MatthewJWalls commented 9 years ago

A quote from PG about wikipedia:

"What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica. "

Neil Stephenson in the novel "The Diamond Age" describes a hypothetical Book for children. The book contains a database of a massive amount of information, and an AI that writes procedurally generated, never-ending story as you read it. The book starts out simply, but as the kid grows up with it, it gets more complicated and starts putting elements of learning and knowledge into the story as it writes it. You can ask the book questions, and it will answer you, and you can choose what you want to happen in the book and it will rewrite itself.

That's pretty lofty but it got me thinking about the idea of a database of information, like wikipedia, that instead of being stored as a series of static article pages, has some more optimal internal structure, and then in front of it, you have a presentation layer that dynamically changes the content based on the reader's wishes.

Example: You go to the system and tell it you want to know about transistors. It knows you're not very good at mathematics yet, so it auto-includes the derivation of all the equations and purposely adds links to content about mathematics.

Another way of looking at it would be a universal coursera/khan acadaemy type system that everybody contributes to like a wiki.

MatthewJWalls commented 9 years ago

When you think about it, the article format of Wikipedia is horrible for referencing a massive amount of information. You really need the information structure to be something more discrete but with better presentation layer tools.

MatthewJWalls commented 9 years ago

This is also a very fuzzy idea that I haven't defined. The problem is open to interpretation.

MatthewJWalls commented 9 years ago

I just realised one interpretation of this is a recommendation engine for knowledge. Except the recommendations are merged into one article for you to read.

MatthewJWalls commented 9 years ago

I've given it some more thought and tried to come up with concrete ideas that can actually be implemented. I'll raise them as separate issues.

MatthewJWalls commented 9 years ago

Proposed veto because this is a crap-shoot as to whether it can be pulled off.