User:Jroes/Ideas

I have a lot of ideas about WikiMedia, and I thought I'd maintain a small page with some of the ideas I have. Yes, I know there is a feature requests page, but it is very crowded.

Feel free to discuss or add to this of course! Just try to keep it organized and concise, most of the Wiki pages I've read are too long. They should be split up, which is one of my ideas listed here.

Rating/Voting system

I think that there should be some sort of structured rating/voting going on within Wiki communities. For instance, pages could be rated based on their usefulness, etc. Similar to how Slashdot comments are rated.

Voting would also be interesting to implement. Would be very helpful in situations where the community is faced with a number of options concerning the organization of information in a particular section.

One of the coolest ideas I thought of though, was to give ratings/titles based on amount of contribution to contributors on Wikis. This sort of vanity encourages contribution.

Forum-like discussion

Discussion/Talk pages seem to be pretty disorganized. "Editing the page" seems counterintuitive to participating in discussion. Discussion should be more structured, similar to how forums are- a table of threads, posts shown vertically with authors' names centered to the left of every contribution to the discussion. I realize that Wikis are not forums, but this is a case where the organization of Wiki discussion could be improved through the adaptation of existing methods. Most people are already familiar with the way forums work, this keeps things looking the way that users are accustomed to.

Spell check

A spell check button should be available at the bottom of every edit page. This will help to reduce simple spelling errors.

Moving pages

When moving pages, Whatlinkshere should show up on the move page, so the user moving the page knows what should be updated. Ideally, the links to the page should be automatically updated.

Guides/Classifications

I notice that a lot of things on Wiki are how-tos/guides. Normal how-tos/guides have next, previous, up, home, etc. pages. It would be interesting if this could be implemented in WikiMedia. Maybe generalizing it a bit more, a way to classify collections of data could be implemented. And according to certain classifications, special features could be implemented for each.