[Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

Fri May 7 00:04:05 UTC 2010

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 4:31 PM, robert_horning at netzero.net
<robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> ---------- Original Message ----------
> From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
>
>
> No, it won't. People have been saying that for years and the fact
> remains that a screen full of a text with a few relevant images is a
> much better way to convey information than VR.
>
> ----
>
> I look at comments like this as somebody who is very closed minded and not willing to see more methods of instruction.  A screen full of text certainly is a useful way to convey certain kinds of factual information, and I certainly see the analogy of a paper encyclopedia to be a useful way to compile and organize general knowledge about this universe we live in, but it isn't the only way and certainly isn't the "best" way to learn about all knowledge.
>

I think I agree with others, that there's no evident future growth to
VR as the access modality for the web / internet information resources
writ large.  One could posit a UI development of some sort which
changed people's minds on that - but it's not sitting at the edge of
credible technology / waiting for a userbase explosion.

Let me pose this a different way, however.  Take UI entirely out of
the picture - the Wikimedia Foundation is all about supporting
projects that gather and create information for the public good,
presenting that to the public, and creating software to encourage
that.

As no proof-of-concept now exists for a shift to VR taking off and
replacing the web as the dominant modality, the proposal is premature.
 It's a Computer Science UI problem right now, a topic for research.
The foundation isn't a research foundation, it's a practical
engineering and content foundation.  We should not, in my opinion,
spend a lot of effort attempting to pioneer new areas of CS research.

If we hypothesize that such a new modality develops out in the
research community, then we could move to support / adopt it in good
time.

Additionally, we can think about how we do our current primary goal,
of gathering and creating information for the public good, and think
about whether we'd do that differently if our UI modality was
something other than the web.  Such thinking might usefully inform
next-generation wiki tool development, in terms of how information is
managed within the WMF projects.

I don't see any obvious changes there, but I haven't thought about it that much.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com