One idea I had, but lack the chops to implement.
One idea I had, but lack the chops to implement.
The major problem with new agents' understanding of the things we find is that there are so many points of entry, and only the dedicated can find how it all ties together. There is a wiki, but you have to more or less know what you're looking for. And the story of all this is one of many connections and ties, that once arrived at, open up new vistas of understanding.
What would be nice is a system wherein there are a set of wiki pages, but they're tied together by semantic tags, and there is a presentation layer that will show you timelines of events.
So you'd search for, say, Waratah, and get a list of all the players involved, and a chronology of things tagged with that. Each salient event gets its own page, but you can keep going through timelines and seeing parallels and connections in an intuitive way.
We could use the existing wiki as a base, but then we need to figure the templating system out that would draw upon it to present this information in such a way that would foment new connections.
For example, you'd have a page for Hank Johnson. On that page would be all the known significant actions we have for him, and a rough time or point of relation to other events (such as "Wrote paper on power points", "Visited Congo", "Deployed power cube", "Broke into CERN", etc.) This would develop organically, and would mostly be based on biographical info. Each sub-event gets a tag of when we can best figure it happened (or at least a larger thing it's tied to, like a book or anomaly) and then a series of all the other events it's salient to. So, Hank erasing the glyph on Jarvis would get tagged with a rough time, and then, say, "Glyphs", "Jarvis", "Post-Niantic", "Dark XM", "Level 8", "CERN", and the list of tags could grow as needed. This would help us develop a better structure of who did what when, and reveal connections not otherwise apparent.
Catching up is heck of hard and gets harder every day. This might help a bit.
The major problem with new agents' understanding of the things we find is that there are so many points of entry, and only the dedicated can find how it all ties together. There is a wiki, but you have to more or less know what you're looking for. And the story of all this is one of many connections and ties, that once arrived at, open up new vistas of understanding.
What would be nice is a system wherein there are a set of wiki pages, but they're tied together by semantic tags, and there is a presentation layer that will show you timelines of events.
So you'd search for, say, Waratah, and get a list of all the players involved, and a chronology of things tagged with that. Each salient event gets its own page, but you can keep going through timelines and seeing parallels and connections in an intuitive way.
We could use the existing wiki as a base, but then we need to figure the templating system out that would draw upon it to present this information in such a way that would foment new connections.
For example, you'd have a page for Hank Johnson. On that page would be all the known significant actions we have for him, and a rough time or point of relation to other events (such as "Wrote paper on power points", "Visited Congo", "Deployed power cube", "Broke into CERN", etc.) This would develop organically, and would mostly be based on biographical info. Each sub-event gets a tag of when we can best figure it happened (or at least a larger thing it's tied to, like a book or anomaly) and then a series of all the other events it's salient to. So, Hank erasing the glyph on Jarvis would get tagged with a rough time, and then, say, "Glyphs", "Jarvis", "Post-Niantic", "Dark XM", "Level 8", "CERN", and the list of tags could grow as needed. This would help us develop a better structure of who did what when, and reveal connections not otherwise apparent.
Catching up is heck of hard and gets harder every day. This might help a bit.
I'd love to help with this. Let me know what I can do. I've been looking to get my local community more involved in the story and this could help a lot. I've faced that same question many times "where do I start", but the wiki is confusing and the books are incomplete.
ReplyDeleteHere's what we need, in my manager-level 30kft overview:
ReplyDeleteA template for the wiki that reads tags and presents links to certain pages based on the above schema.
An effort by Essex people to tag everything in every way possible.
Once the first happens, the second is easy. We just need someone with the requisite Web Fu.
I am not sure if the platform/wiki software being used by the current wiki has a lot of flex in that aspect. I do a lot of wiki creation using semantic wiki software like mediawiki with the semantic extension. IN wiki terms - you have pages and categories and tags - semantic wikis add properties which allow for the next level in relational data between wiki content.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, what you are looking for, I am not even sure a wiki is the right platform, especially if many find the wiki confusing now.
What is needed is a searchable database system with a nice user GUI
yeah maybe I got the wrong technical underpinning (my area is CAD, materials, and 3D printing, haha.) You sound like you have experience in these matters. Care to knock up something quick and stupid so we can play around? I know what I want it to look like, just not how to make it.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I'd love to see the database as a back end to a timeline-like interface. They can scroll around the timeline and explore the relationships between the bits of information out there. That's the hard part to do is make sense of the mountain of information that's out there and put it together in a way that makes sense to the user. It's all jumbled and out of order.
ReplyDeleteI love a infographic.
ReplyDeleteinfographics are awesome and are often easier to make then a relational database with a slick GUI - well for me at least LOL - perhaps there are others out there who could... but yeah infographics for the quick static and a searchable interactive for the dynamic
ReplyDeleteI can do infographics, if we want to put together the data for them.
ReplyDelete