Thesis update

One of the issues I have had with my MediaWiki (wikipedia software) redesign has been my lack of redesigning anything but the obvious. That changed recently when I started thinking about what collaboration even means. Why this model? How might it work if we could do anything?

Among many other areas, I started looking deeply into the history of an article. So after 3 or so pages of hand drawn pages, and endless arrows and notes, I felt I was ready to move onto illustrator. What I came up with so far has is a completely new way to visualize and deal with the pages history. This new system would allow a user to quickly see the size of the changes, and pinpoint when the article was reverted (in pink). Clicking on a change would show the article below in the same window. Currently you need to go back and forth between pages if you want to view multiple points of the pages history. You can also see a comparison between historic-pages, though currently not very user friendly. In this version you can easily select two points to see the differences. This doesn’t change much about how the system works, but I think I makes the way of looking/using at history much more elegant. One feature I think may be useful, is the ability to highlight changes made only certain users, or only changes made to certain  sections. Perhaps search the notes and show/highlight history nodes containing that information (for molly).

An other area I have been looking at is… Imagine this scenario: You are viewing a page on Wikipedia, but 10sec before you loaded that pages, someone inserted false information. Normally content on wikipedia is somewhere above 90% accurate. But this comes from the mass amount of people being to oversee the article. This also means that older content has the highest probability for being correct, and newer the lowest. In this scenario, this 10sec old content is wrong, but there is no way of knowing it. The user could check the history, but this, in my mind, is too much to ass of the user. So… What if the reader could know that that content is very new and has that higher risk? What I am looking at is a way to color code data(can be toggled on/off) so that users can see what information has a high risk, and also what has been highly reviewed. Perhaps a yellow background on content that has not had the possibility for that that pier review? Maybe a light blue for information you can trust?

Idea friday – Finish Sunday

When the Ideas come, they don’t stop. I work up early on friday to get some work done before I went to my last day of my winter internship at Tellart when I came up with an idea. 

One of my sites, TheGiant.org, is home to a community of over 2500 art collectors. It is just over 3 years old, but friday morning I felt compelled to make it possible to allow the members of the forum to keep track of their Shepard Fairey works. My last semester starts tomorrow, so I knew I had to finish it by tonight. 

I got it done faster than I thought I would, and I think it came out better, and having more functionality than I thought it would when I started it. I managed to interface with the existing database to handle users, messaging etc. The add-on allows users to track their owned, selling, and wanted prints, and even allows for privacy settings for each list. Users can also take advantage of the friends feature the site has and set lists as friends only. Each user has a URL can link to, to allow them to see their collection. The site also allows users to search others wanted/selling/trading lists to help each other find the pieces they want.

The entire system was built in an AJAX fashion which actually made it much faster to code the php.

Mootools allowed me to make the interaction of the site much nicer, and give a lot more feedback to the user when things happen, and the MooTools AJAX allowed me to reduce the entire system down to only 3 pages. The layover system I normally use is called SmoothBox, but for what ever reason wouldn’t work inside of MediaWiki (Where the user adds prints to their collection). I figured I’d give it a shot and make one my self. Knowing some tricks in css (full bowser compatible transparency etc) , I was actually able to do it in 3 lines of JavaScript. It surprised me how well it worked, and SmoothBox never worked on the iPhone, but mine did. Maybe Ill write plugin of my own sometime.