May 24, 2019

Social Wiki for Artificial Intelligence


The newly discovered AI Wiki https://ai.fandom.com/ was extended with some smaller articles. To make things more comfortable, I've searched for similar projects in the past and found two existing projects. The first one is active today and is a bibliography creation wiki for papers about natural language processing, https://natural-language-understanding.fandom.com It contains of 300 articles right now. A second canceled project from the past was a Game AI wiki, https://web.archive.org/web/2010*/http://wiki.aigamedev.com/ Which had around 180 articles. Also with the idea to collect URL of existing ressources in a wiki.
Both projects seems technically very advanced. The only problem was, that the amount of contributers was too small. I think the idea of a social wiki makes sense, the only thing what is important is, that the project should be established for a longer period and with more man power in the background. Let us make some calculations.
Even without knowing the details of both mentioned wikis the assumption is, that there were realized as a one-person wiki. A single enthusiast is collecting some URLs to existing ressources at a single place and he is using a wiki for that purpose. According to my knowledge this is the cheapest way in doing so. The only thing what was missing was a bit luck to scale the wiki project upwards. Suppose, not a single person, but 5 persons are contributing to the wiki. And they are doing so not only for 6 months, but for 3 years. As a result the overall amount of articles would be much greater, and as a consequence more people would notice about the wiki.

Reducing the costs
The key factor for realizing a social wiki project is to hold the costs down. Most wiki projects in the past were canceled, because the single admin of the project has stopped the project and then the server costs were too high. In case of a fandom wiki project, the wiki is free of charge. Instead the website is financed by advertaisment. Also it is very useful, that new users doesn't have to register at the wiki itself, but can create an account within the fandom universe. To reduce the costs further, here is a recommendation for adding new URLs to the wiki.



It is the same template I'm using for adding new facts to the wiki. The idea is to put the URL into the tag and use as a default category the current year. Also each article becomes a date in the title, similar to a wiki news article. The reason is, that in contrast to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, it is possible to create for the same topic many articles. For example about the topic behavior tree, at least three articles were created in the system so far.

Example

Let us make an example. A user has found an interesting URL in the Internet and would like to submit it to the wiki. What he has to do is to fill the information into the template and create a new article for it.
I have changed the date field, and copy&paste the URL into the "ref" tag. If the new article is created in the system it can be categorized further and -- very important -- can be discussed by other. for example at the talk page.