Sidewiki

[Charles Matthews]

Sidewiki is from Google, is a toolbar feature they have come up with for
commenting web pages, and is apparently launched tomorrow:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-and-learn-from-others-as-you.html

So now the entire Web gets talkpages. Sadly this doesn't actually make
the entire Web a wiki.

Charles


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[Charles Matthews]

Oops, can't read/can't count at this time in the morning - was launched
23rd September (see [[Google Toolbar]]). Does anyone actually use this
in ways relevant to WP?

Charles


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[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews@...> wrote:

> Oops, can't read/can't count at this time in the morning - was launched
> 23rd September (see [[Google Toolbar]]). Does anyone actually use this
> in ways relevant to WP?

I downloaded the Google toolbar specifically to try out the side-wiki
but the icon has remained greyed out whenever I've looked at it. I've
heard reports of people giving it a go without such a problem, so not
sure what's going on and I haven't really felt moved to investigate.

I heard a radio show discussing side-wiki and one issue they raised
was that it gave web owners no control over what people said about
their site in the wiki (as opposed, say, to on-site comments).

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[Charles Matthews]

Bod Notbod wrote:
> I heard a radio show discussing side-wiki and one issue they raised
> was that it gave web owners no control over what people said about
> their site in the wiki (as opposed, say, to on-site comments).
>  
Hmmm, and it would be a way of commenting on any site while keeping your
IP number between yourself and Google, too. Not that I would expect a
radio discussion to be as interested in privacy issues as we sometimes
are. If this ever turned out to be popular, there would be a spam issue.
Is Google's idea that if you spam on Sidewiki they nuke your pagerank on
their search engine?

It's a big shame they have attached "wiki" to something that isn't (is
more in the blogging family of user-generated opinion content, if you
ask me). I thought these guys were supposed not to be evil.

Charles



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[Sage Ross]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews@...> wrote:
> Does anyone actually use this
> in ways relevant to WP?
>

I rather like the first ("most helpful") sidewiki comment from the main page:

"Sidewiki provides what Wikipedia has long needed. A place for people
to discuss an article or its topic without discussing the editing of
it. This gives people an outlet without cluttering discussion pages
with what amount to forum posts."

I think we should have done this a long time ago ourselves, in the
same way that Wikinews does it with a third tab after the article and
the talk page for venting and non-editing-related discussion.

But I haven't seen anything really compelling about sidewiki in
particular yet.  It seems like a crippled alternative to the "blog
comments" Firefox plugin Google used to have but then disabled.

-Sage

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[stevertigo-2]

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@...> wrote:
> Oops, can't read/can't count at this time in the morning - was launched
> 23rd September (see [[Google Toolbar]]). Does anyone actually use this
> in ways relevant to WP?

Its a good question. There have been web annotation tools out there
for a while, and while it would make sense for WP, there are caveats.
The main one is that it does not make sense for anyone to just use one
on their own - some coordination has to be involved, and if
coordination is involved, some selection of which web annotation tool
we use is necessary. In that context an open source tool like
ShiftSpace will probably be of higher concern than a Google tool, but
OTOH if Google made something that was extremely popular these
concerns might be on the back board at least until something free and
usable.

It's long been my opinion that we need a web annotation system for WP,
but someone will probably just retort with a comment like: "*cough*
'talk pages?'" The idea behind web annotation on WP is to basically
have meta tweets about editorial points from an interface that's even
easier than wiki editing of the article or talk pages. An annotation
layer could do at least things that our current setup cannot: 1) It
could be easier to make a quick editorial note 2) that note could
point directly to a specific item of text. If we take this kind of
functionality - a div layer with editable notes probably - and
integrate it into our current system - automatic (redundant) posting
to a new talk page section...

Eh. I could go on. And Mr. Ross just chimed in ahead of me..

-Stevertigo

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[Andrew Gray-3]

2009/10/22 Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia@...>:

> But I haven't seen anything really compelling about sidewiki in
> particular yet.  It seems like a crippled alternative to the "blog
> comments" Firefox plugin Google used to have but then disabled.

It reminds me faintly of google's searchwiki, which let people
annotate search results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_SearchWiki

...and I suspect it may remain about as obscure.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray@...

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