Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/29/mememoir_uber_wiki_announced/
Psychologist invents new uber-wiki
'Mememoir' tech to make Wikipedia obsolete?
Posted in Applications, 29th August 2008 16:16 GMT
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An American psychologist has invented a new form of wiki in which every word is directly linked to its author. He believes the so-called "mememoir"* project will "revolutionize publishing in all of science".
The Mememoir super-attribution wiki is the brainchild of Dr Robert Hoffman (http://cmapsinternal.ihmc.us/servlet/SBReadResourceServlet?rid=1197480481720_777343812_10092&partName=htmltext), an academic psychologist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and visiting brain at MIT.
Hoffman argues that it's difficult to tell who's said what on an ordinary, intensively-edited wiki page. "How could the reader of such an article know who wrote what," he asks. He also reckons that standard methods of wiki administration - as seen most famously, perhaps, at famed online hive-mind jumbleshop bogo-encyclo Wikipedia - are "an important problem ... first generation wikis... depend on slow and refutable top-down decisions".
But Hoffman reckons he has the answer in his new Mememoir superwiki, where every word is attributable - leading, apparently, to the "End of Anonymity". Similarly, the mysterious dealings of Wikipedia admins, ArbComs etc. are to be replaced by "a self-regulating reputation system" based on - wait for it - users rating each other's contributions.
The new wiki+digg+2.0 sciento-mashup-u-like kit is described at mememoir.org (http://www.mememoir.org/), or you can watch a vid, play with it etc here (http://www.wikigenes.org/). Alternatively, you can read Hoffman's old-school scholarly article in Nature Genetics (ref: Nature Genetics 40, 1047 - 1051 (2008), doi:10.1038/ng.f.217).
"This release is an important proof of principle," says Hoffman. "Our ambitious aim with the Mememoir project is to revolutionize publishing in all of science with a knowledge base that is open access, interdisciplinary and combines the altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship."
Good luck with that. ®
*Yuck.