Groupprops:Multiple-wiki vision

This article describes how Groupprops fits into a multiple-wiki vision.

The multiple-wiki model
Described below, briefly, is the multiple-wiki model.

Vegetable-sellers
Think of fruit and vegetable vendors. There are usually all kinds of shops that sell fruits and vegetables. If you go around in a typical city, you will find some small vendors, some supermarkets selling fruits and vegetables, and some big wholesalers at far-off places that sell fruits and vegetables in bulk quantities. Some shops will sell vegetables imported from other countries, or speciality vegetables. Some shops will specialize in selling the freshest and best vegetables.

The underlying themes here are variety, accessibility, choice. If you don't want to go too far, you can buy vegetables off the nearby vendor. If you like to shop in bulk, you can go to the wholesalers and buy carton-fulls. If you prefer certain special kinds of fruits and vegetables that are unvailable locally, you can go to the shops which sell special vegetables.

In contrast, we could have a centralized fruit/vegetable distribution system, where you decide how much of each kind of vegetable you want, and go to the central store to collect that much.

Wikis as vegetable-sellers
The way I would like to think of wikis is as individual vegetable-sellers. Not all of them would be of equal size, or would be selling the same kind of stuff.


 * There will be some big wholesalers, and supermarket-types, who will dominate by selling vegetables in bulk (not necessarily the best quality, or finely picked, but everything, cheap and in bulk). These may correspond to the giant encyclopedias and other giant wikis, of which right now there is only Wikipedia.

Even among the big sellers, there could be ones with different policies -- in the wiki situation, there is Citizendium trying to challenge Wikipedia as the defining online encyclopedia.


 * There will be some local shops, which specialize in various areas. These will, to some extent, be competing with the big sellers, but at the same time will make use of the big sellers -- they may themselves buy stuff from the big sellers. They may also compete with each other, but given that they all sit in different geographical areas and cater to slightly different customer segments, the competition will not override the need for cooperation.

In the same way, there will be small wikis, each catering to particular needs, each being the local shop of choice for some people, with some tastes, and in some areas. They may share data and content, copy from the big wikis, even allow the big wikis to copy from them.

Pick the wiki of your choice
Just like people may decide each day to pick the restaurant or the shop or the song that suits their mood and their situation best, so people should have the freedom and flexibility to choose the wiki that best serves their present interests and moods.

Each one can have its own guidelines and policies
A wiki for all suffers from the same kind of disadvantage as mob rule -- it relies on the fundamental assumption that everybody has, or at any rate should have, a common purpose, that this common purpose can be achieved by consensus, and anything that is not part of the common purpose is irrelevant or redundant or unnecessary.

Just like the let's all be together and live happily ever after is a voice used to overlook or drown differences, the same way, a wiki-for-all policy can be a way of suppressing natural differences in views of how information and knowledge can be organized or disseminated. This, of course, does not mean that general-purpose encyclopedic wikis should be discouraged. Rather:


 * There isn't, and probably can't be, anything such as the encyclopaedic wiki that everybody likes. We should hope for a diversity of encyclopedic wikis
 * there should be a lot of wikis that don't aim to be encyclopedic at all

The danger of a myopic vision
Although it is becoming increasingly easy to start one's own wiki, the influx of effort into creating new and comprehensive wikis into particular areas is currently low. What is more alarming, though, is the increasing dominance and preponderance of one particular wiki: Wikipedia. People who use the Internet are increasingly relying on Wikipedia (in addition to Google search) as the way to understand what a term means. So the goal of creating a vibrant market with lots of vegetable sellers needs to be pursued with diligent effort if we don't want Wikipedia to be a monopoly by sheer inertia and size.

Instead, let's think this way: For the data/content that you want, is Wikipedia a good enough source? Does it fulfill the functions you would seek from a good text/reference book? The chances are that it fails on at least a few counts.

If you are actively involved with editing on Wikipedia, then think this way: are you somewhat unsupportive of the way Wikipedia handles disputes and with Wikipedia's policies? Would you like to have a wiki where the content would be of a different sort, or organized differently?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then: may be you should try to see whether there are already such wikis in existence! There probably may be; wikis that just got started and where you could feel much happier and more productive both working for and getting information from.

How Groupprops fits in
Since the time of its conception to the time of this writing, Groupprops remains, to my knowledge, the first math wiki of its kind. It is hoped that it will spur a trend of math wikis, even if the Groupprops effort in itself does not prove to be very successful. Each wiki may look at particular mathematical topics from particular perspectives, and each can benefit from the perspectives offered by the others. In each wiki there will be the dedicated shopkeepers who will work hard solely for their wiki, but there will be others who flit around from one to the next, trying to figure out which they like best!

On the lines of Groupprops, I am working on some other wikis: