One of my chief frustrations with wikis are the barriers between them and the zealous wiki editors. Wikipedia's tests of article relevance are fair, but aren't encouraging the formation of the sum of human knowledge. There is of course a trade-off between quantity and quality. If Wikipedia allowed me to make my personal page few people have an interest in keeping it accurate and really I have an interest in making myself look good.
Of course Wikipedia isn't alone - there are thousands of active wikis. One problem is that there are a lot of duplicate articles that are all written from different points of view, for different audiences, and in various degrees of depth. If I'm on Wikipedia, I'd like to be able to access the other articles because these other wikis are harder to find. The best attempt I can find is Wikia, but they only can have a fraction of the wikis, and there still aren't easy connections between them.
I've been thinking of how to solve this:
The easiest (and worst) way is to just copy the text from the article into the rest and allow everyone on the different wikis to edit the same text - of course this doesn't allow the article to address the proper audience, so that won't work.
I thought of maybe having parts of different wiki articles common between different wikis where Wikipedia article may be dynamically loaded in an iFrame between sites, but that gets messy very quickly.
There is a more elegant way that could largely solve the problem though. What I propose is the use the same mechanism used for language selection on the left sidebar. Why not just have all wiki articles linked a similar sidebar. This may be possible semantically using the URL or at least at first manually. Say I'm on the Wikipedia article for options, and I want to know more. I can just clickthrough to Investopedia's page for options which is like an intro page the massive topic of options.
Another possible way would be to have an in-wiki way of pulling pieces of other wikis into article subtopic. For instance, the Wikipedia article mentions the butterfly spread strategy and actually has a brief article on it. However, Investopedia has a very in-depth article about how to actually do it. You can even see a version of this in under option strategy section above. I just think it'd be great to have an easy way of including these articles amongst sites.
Overall, I love wikis and making knowledge more accessible, but I think something like this is needed to better serve the long tail of articles on other wikis - saving them from the pragmatic wiki zealots.
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