Well I’m not going to talk specifically about Wikipedia, but this topic could be of interest for its evolution as well. That’s why:

Consumerpedia aims to be a sort of Wikipedia clone in the consumer space with a page for each topic, rated comments and navigation suggestions to other related topics.

From what I can see the amount of information is very low. Finding out a populated topic is a major task, but it is a quite new experiment.

What’s interesting from my point of view is anyway their way to dynamically organize the topics without a predetermined hierarchy of categories:

Consumerpedia has no built in category hierarchy, but rather uses a unique user-driven hierarchical tagging system. This lets users create and define the relationships between different topics, helping others easily discover and browse related information.

What kind of structure is allowed? Easily said:

• Categories: you can specify a topic for each page
• Sub Categories: you can specify a category that is a sub-topic of already existing topic. You are creating a hierarchy here
• Related Topics: a symmetrical relationships of relevance between topics
• Topic Redirection: used in misspelling cases to create an alias for the preferred term

There is not a global navigation tool: each page can be reached only through the search engine (and I’m very skeptic about this approach because the information scent is completely absent here and users are blindly typing keywords).

Hierarchical tagging is one of the Facetag foundations so I’m pretty curious to see to which extent users will add this structure in Consumerpedia.

Back to the initial statement: I’m sure that this approach could work in Wikipedia where the user base is large and the motivations to participate very strong. There is anyway a main trend stating that this way to proceed is too complex for average users and that structure won’t never be systematically introduced into collaborative systems.

Let’s see but I got some infos saying that Marti Hearst (you know the Flamenco project from Berkeley) is working on a faceted approach over user generated tags..

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.