Whackpedia
From Whackpedia
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Content
It is now 2008, and for a very long time we have been dreaming of a society where ideas are shared quickly, and research happens at a rapid rate. With the advent of internet research has indeed become thousand fold faster, but there are still bottlenecks in the methods used in research and development. It can take a good six months after writing a novel research paper to get it reviewed and published. This creates a huge lag in the rate at which real research happens, because only after research has been reviewed and published does the process of building upon it even begin. This is why development in the industry moves much faster than the development in academia, because in the industry it is about getting the product out fast, and not about the long periods of time spent trying to get a paper published about it.
Well, starting now in 2008, we intend to change that. We would like people to be able to record ideas, and do collaborative research on topics effecting human life and society, without the long delays. It will also help establish better understanding and more coherence in the ideas around the globe. Sites like Wikipedia make great databases of collective information but they are restricted to only publishing well accepted and pre-published materials, while thousands of people are individually blogging about the information they are getting. Yet, how many of these thousands of blogs actually get read? One piece of information appears, and everyone has similar thoughts about it, and we see thousands of blogs with the same information, but there is no vertical integration of the information, which is what eventually leads to new ideas and concepts. Social networking websites allow local discussion of topics, but there the discussions get buried under click the next button to see the next 10 posts, and often the discussions are not long lasting and do not actually lead to any significant impact.
There are many serious and significant problems man today faces. Take for example predicting earthquakes. We still have not come up with any serious method of predicting earthquakes, and the methods and ways by which research papers are written and published, it could perhaps take another hundred years before we can start properly predicting these devastating beasts. But by bringing together the ideas of thousands of people, and allowing the brilliant ideas to come up about without the tedium of writing a research paper and getting it published, might actually allow for a solution much sooner. The intention of Whackpedia is to discuss such important issues, and bring more meaning to human life and build a healthier planet.
Discussion
Now Google is also trying to compete in this area by establishing a new user edited encyclopedia known as Knol. See: http://www.minyanville.com/articles/GOOG-google-results-search-knol-encyclopedia/index/a/18486/from/yahoo
Right now it doesn't have entries other than what has been posted by the employees of Google itself, and it's beta version is available at http://knol.google.com/k#
Well, Whackpedia remains unique in it the sense that it is not just a user edited encyclopedia but a much bigger integration of user ideas.
Wikipedia for many things has shown up at the top of the search results in Google for quite some time. Will Google now manipulate this to show Knol at the top from now on, the way it did with Mapquest, where it went off and built Google maps and started showing those first? It seems that all of Google's ideas are simply ripped off from whoever else is doing well. First Yahoo was doing a good job at searching, Google built that, then came email, chat, maps, documents, social network known as Orkut, and now Knol. I might just start using the Yahoo search engine once again, I think it's just as good a search engine.
In early 2007, I had started http://scientificchess.com/community although many people and users were not invited because I had bigger development plans which I still do. In fact the idea of Whackpedia followed in some sense because I think there was less a need to get people to form a community after Myspace and Facebook etc. and more for an open sort of discussion. My first social network setup was done in tables in a Geocities website called Fierclan, when I was had just graduated from high school and wrote my first book Fierce Game of Foolish Geniuses, when Tom came out with a real website called Myspace. And then came Facebook. I really admire both Myspace and Facebook, and today there are hundreds and thousands of social networks built from the open source social networking softwares. Facebook software is not open source although according to TechCrunch there was something about a part of the source code getting leaked http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/11/facebook-source-code-leaked/.
Today, https://www.researchgate.net/ claims it is "first scientific network," which has been founded by a Harvard founder. It has been started just now in 2008. Compare to http://scientificchess.com/community which I started in 2007. Anyways, I believe that Whackpedia is going to be a great place for me to collaborate with you all, let me know what you think. I will also be working on that with my buddies here at Stanford, if you are here at Stanford then let me know if you are interested in working along. The exact details of the plan obviously cannot be published yet but as always it will be for the development of science.
-Aditya Mittal Aug 13, 2008
Linkedin announces discussion forums also. - Aug 26, 2008
Suggestions for Whackpedia
Content
Here are a few things Whackpedia is looking to implement very soon:
- Whackpedia Updates page
- 24 Hour Realtime Chatboxes so the world can chat together...
- Latex setup for mathematical equation typing
- Games/Stocks apps
- Developer's API
- Writer's toolbox
- Worldwide Events Calendar
- Stock Ticker
- Media and Video Integration
User Interface suggestions
We are looking for suggestions on improving our user interface.
A banish button like the one proposed on this page http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/ to banish the discussion of a unwanted user on the screen, if it helps clean up the page a bit for clearer reading.
Automatic linking from chat to Whackpedia for relevant topics.
Machine Learning
We are looking into machine learning features that would improve Whackpedia in helping the progression of research.
Discussion
Any suggestions for improving and maintaining Whackpedia? How can we get more users and better more meaningful discussions going?
If there are more ideas and things you would like to see implemented on Whackpedia, please let me know. Also, let me know if there is good open source code, or other php code, that can help me speed up the development of these items for Whackpedia.
YouTube video with hot chicks wearing Whackpedia.com shirts?? It usually works! (that is just more users; probably not that good for meaningful discussions)
Hehe, how about a full political campaign with Obama girl and McCain girl with Hillary endorsing the site then, and Gates funding it to promote Windows...and perhaps Oprah would like to talk about it on her show
External Links
External Links
The Whackpedia backboard: http://www.getbackboard.com/view/pRN9zv33e4/ga:1
