A meta-website is something which stands on the shoulder of giants. A blog is not a meta-website even it is great. What makes a website to a meta-site has to do if other people see it the same way. A typical example for a meta-website is Google websearch. This search engine is on place 1 in the traffic rank and all the people in the Internet are using it for search.
Another website which is often called the frontpage of the Internet is Reddit. But Reddit is very similar to what Facebook is, so in reality most people would argue that their Facebook is the meta-page of the internet. How does all these websites relates to each other? And are there are any other meta websites out there?
The true meta-website is not very often cited, it is wikinews. WIkinews is the most important single project of the wikimedia foundation. WIkinews is more important than Reddit and Facebook combined. Basicaly spoken, Facebook is something which has good features and some bad ideas, while Wikinews has only good ideas. Sometimes Wikinews is called the most dangerous project which is more disruptive than Facebook, but let us go a step back and analyze why Facebook and Reddit are calling themself a meta-site.
A social network is a website in which users are posting URLs to content which is already there. What the users are doing is to create a playlist collaborative in groups. This allows the group to get the entire picture of the internet. Instead of subscribing a single blog, the user shares the link with the group. This concept is very powerful and it is working in Reddit and Facebook as well.
From a formal perspective both websites can be treated as the same. The are both curated playlists of the internet's content. Now we have to ask how the technology looks like which makes Reddit and Facebook obsolete. Both websites have a disadvantage. In front the website the user logs in, while in the background the company is waiting for him. And the normal Facebook user can't see what the admins are doing secretly. This disadvantage can be overcome with a wiki system. In a wiki the normal user can track the admin. THis is possible with the version history.
Let me give an example. In facebook the admin removes a post from a post. The user sees that the post is not there but he doesn't know why. Even the action itself is not visible, because their is no logfile which proves that the admin has deleted a post. As a result, a user can state anything but nobody will trust him.
In a wiki system this is not possible. All the actions are recorded in the overall changelog. This makes a wiki the better social network. Somebody may argue, that the Wikinews project is not a social network, but it is. The idea is, that the users are submitting links and these URLs are grouped in categories and can be commented by other others. Let us take a look into the help section of Wikinews.
What is listed there are many interesting websites: for example to search in the Web (google websearch), to search in the news (google news). Wikinews even has a category with Facebook stories https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Facebook That means, the Wikinews website sitts on top of the entire Internet. Google, Facebook, Reddit, Blogs and everything else is under Wikinews.
It is hard, and perhaps impossible to analyze what Wikinews is doing. A wikinews watchblog would be one option in doing so. A watchblog is trying to observe what another website is doing.
The most funny thing is that the overall traffic of Wikinews is ultraslow compared to other mentioned websites. According to the last (faked) statistics around 8000 pageviews per day is generated by the Wikinews mainpage. That means, we have an interesting combination of a top website plus a low public interest. The reason is, that most people think that Facebook should be observed carefully. They are asking what hair color Mark Zuckerberg has and when the redesign of the website is done. But Facebook is overrated. Sure, it is the most important social network according to the traffic, but it doesn't sits on top of WIkinews. Facebook is based on the classcial propriatary model. Which means the software is not open source, and nobody is able to see the version log or to analyze the amount of postings. This is hidden from the public.
In Wikinews all the actions of the admns are available to the public. Even the complete SQL dump of the website including the fulltext of the discussion is available for download. This is the reason why the project is more advanced than Facebook.
Let us compare Wikinews with Google search and with Wikipedia. Are these projects more important than Wikinews? No they don't. Google is an automatic websearch. What the user finds in the index is a mirror of the internet. That means, Google contains the same information already known. The Wikipedia project is a content creation project. The idea is that new content is produced similar to creating a new blog or writing a large book. In contrast, Wikinews is a social network, which means the users are peer reviewing existing content and curating playlists. This is feature is needed to build a meta-website.
Additionally, Wikinews is not reduced to internet content but publishes news stories from TV stations and printed journals as well. Last but not least the most powerful feature is, that anybody can become a user without any costs.
What i want to tell is, that the overall Wikinews project is a very powerful website which is more dangerous than Facebook and Wikipedia combined.
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