User:Thewinster/Accelerating Wikibooks

Relevant Users on Wikibooks

Please edit this section with the name of the Users with whom I might be able to discuss things and work on a proposal that is not far from the reality. It'll be very useful, since submitting Meta content ANYWHERE on Mediawiki projects till now has not got much of a notice for me. This list is required for me to be proactive.

Summary of the Original Proposal

Create Roadmaps for a book
Define Learning Outcomes
Annotate and Discuss new content available from around the web.
Minor tweaks and fixes which concentrate on crowdsourcing.
Identifying Small Contribution that advance a book and designing good UIs and triggers according to B.J. Fogg's Behavior Change Model, 8 Step Design Process. The paper can be found here at Persuasive Design : Eight Step Process by B. J. Fogg

Text of the original Proposal

This text can still be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Submissions/Accelerating_WikiBooks

Background

It was a logical step to expand the collaborative process behind Wikipedia to give birth to sister projects that dealt with more complicated things than a standalone encyclopaedic article. However, the sluggish development of materials on the Sister Projects drops anvil sized hints on us that the collaborative approach needs much more tinkering and adaptation to best serve the purposes that they were built for.

Proposal

I have been toying around with certain ideas in my head and from this time to the conference, I'll be discussing them in detail with the wikibooks community for feasibility and possible adaptations. The ideas can be summarized as follows:

1. "Begin With An End in Mind" Textbooks differ from A collection of encyclopaedic articles on the same topics in one very simple manner : Textbooks have a learning progression and every chapter has a few learning outcomes. The one key adaptation of Media Wiki software for Wikibooks is to support creating pages that Map Learning Outcomes, derive associated case studies, examples and anecdotes and connect learning outcomes through different chapters.

I will further analyse the processes through which this Map can then be translated into more actions and meaningful edits : using the work of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab and B. J. Fogg Persuasive Design : Eight Step Process by B. J. Fogg

2. Build up a reference material section, separate from the Discussions Page Internet based portals are publishing information at a faster rate then ever before. Even filtering through the best ones and adding annotations and suggestions using these select sources - including magazine articles and newspapers - can build up a large repository of material which could then be fed to the different wikimedia projects.

The proposal here has not been worded to do the idea enough justice. However, the outcomes if such a project comes to fruition are numerous!

These could be...

Consider the current stream of articles on Governance and corruption in the Indian media. Using the best of these news items as sources of ideas for different projects can be a very big move for creating meaningful, more accessible textbooks on Civis, Administration; adapting already existing textbooks in a manner which is easier to create (thanks to what has been deposited in the repository).
Comments on articles on Popular Science, or technical articles in newspapers regarding scientific inventions can trigger discussions on relevant topics, building up examples for the respective topics.

It has to be kept in mind that such a project does not involve using newspaper and media articles as a basis. It uses their content as a trigger to create more reference items, discussions and alternative projects (for let us say Wikiversity) through annotations and debates.

Apart from these major changes, I will be delving deeper into very minor tweaks and fixes that are all geared towards accelrating the iteration of content on larger projects like books and additional learning resources on Wikiversity.

Discussion

Please use these space to ask questions and discuss the proposal. It can be thought of a Talk page instead of a Mainspace page. When the edits become large, I'll organize and split the page.

Ideas I am tinkering with

A system for finding project mates

These could be for a portal, new book project or a simple proposal. Very often, we cannot find enough people to talk to about our submissions and proposals at the right time. Any mechanism through which a submission find its way to relevant people? How about using categories?

Mediawiki has a mechanism for enabling Talkbacks. This could be useful for the spread of messages through the system. People could opt in for information on projects that are taking place. To keep the quality of the messages high, you could have layers in between, where in only those people who review new proposals get a message, and after their approval, the message passes onto other users. Somewhat like the "Like a page and receive updates" system of Facebook.

Making a google Doc spreadsheet

For taking opinions on very simple details that are relevant to this proposal.

A positive experience for a new user

As I said, I want to use B.J. Fogg's Persuasive Technology Design Process on Wikibooks problems. One such problem that we can address is that after a high level of motivation initially, user interest declines.

You can read up his material on how exactly Facebook involves all of its new users directly into the process, thereby promoting new users to become active users, achieving the goals of being making FB a habit as well as increasing the Network Effect.