I would like to propose public and private curations as a feature with a wide variety of potential uses.
Curation in this sense is a named collection of annotated Wikipedia URLs. This may include basic article links, diffs, versioned article links, category links, and so forth. Essentially, anything that can be transformed to an intra-wiki link could be part of a curation. (Off-wiki links would not be eligible for inclusion, in order to keep the scope of curations focused on encyclopedic purposes.) Links to oversighted or deleted content could be added to a curation but the content itself would of course still be restricted.
Curations are:
- Owned and editable by an individual user account; read-only to others if made public
- Private to the owner by default, with the option at any time for the owner to make it public or private
- Similar to Wikipedia categories, but not hierarchical and the 'namespace' of curation names is per-user
- Unrestricted in the number of items they may contain
- Cloneable (if made public), so one user may clone another's public curation and manage it as their own from that point on
- Queryable: if a user has access to a curation, they may search within the linked pages for certain content, or obtain a random sample (of specified size or percentage) of curated items, or view changes to the linked pages that fall within a given span of time
- Contributed under the same license as other Wikipedia content, to the extent the curation is a copyrightable creative work
- Versioned like other WP content, so changes can be seen and reverted to older versions
Potential uses for curations:
- Decentralized way to share/highlight/feature Wikipedia content ("your own personal FA/DYK")
- Personal reference, research, or curriculum
- A solution to the request for categorized/tagged watchlists
- Management of diffs for dispute resolution or other behavior-focused discussion
- Unbiased solicitation of input
User stories:
- I select versioned article links for computer science related articles and add it to my "Best of Wikipedia CS" curation. I make the curation public and solicit others' suggestions for additional candidate article versions.
- I am planning a trip to Italy and build a curation of articles on cities and attractions I hope to visit.
- I am writing a book on Asian history and build a curation of articles that provide useful references to potential sources.
- I want to learn more about the solar system and develop a curation of articles on the subject for further personal study.
- I pull up my "writing implements" curation and view the most recent changes to the Pencil and Stylus articles but not the latest AN/I dustup, because AN/I is not in that curation.
- I have 250 BLP articles listed in a private curation and check it frequently for vandalism or BLP vios on them.
- I have a curation of redlinks that I frequently check to see whether those articles have been created.
- Preparing evidence for an ArbCom case, I develop a private curation with diffs showing editor behavior; then I make the curation public and link to it (transclude it?) on the case's Evidence page for the committee and parties to review.
- I make a "favorite quotes from WP editors" curation and populate it with the pithy sayings, impressive rants, and insightful observations I encounter.
- I prepare two curations for an RfA I am about to face: one is "my contribution highlights" and the other is "my contribution lowlights", each containing diffs from my contribution history.
- I develop a public curation of userpages of editors who are willing to give thoughtful input on difficult questions, and participants in a certain dispute agree to solicit opinions from a random sample of three of those editors.
Justification: Currently a user can make their own ad hoc curations by creating a subpage in their user space and adding whatever links they wish; but these are public to all and (in theory) editable by others. They are also unwieldy, not being easy to manage, maintain, browse, or query. If curations are added as a supported software feature (similar to how categories and watchlists are) then the management, sharing, access control, transclusion, querying, and recent-changes (watchlist) aspects can be optimized for the user experience.
Other thoughts
- The ability to annotate items in a curation has advantages and drawbacks: it can provide useful context for the curated URLs, but can also be abused like any other Wikipedia content (outing, soapboxing, etc.). Admins and oversighters need the ability to (a) force a curation to be private, and (b) restrict a user from making any of their curations public, so that the bits of a curation that would violate WP policy (such as the curation name or the annotations) can be removed from public view and future abuses by that user can be prevented.
- Obviously this would involve significant back-end changes to the MediaWiki software; this is a major feature and not just achievable with clever scripts. A careful architecture and design process would be necessary to get it implemented.
I'd appreciate feedback on this idea. alanyst 13:16, 23 October 2013 (UTC)