A Manifesto for Taking Wikipedia into the Physical World

One of the huge successes in the last few years on the net, has been the blossoming of Wikipedia. I regularly consult it nowadays for information and with increasing frequency.

If you don't know about Wikipedia, here's a very brief catch up. It's a multi-authored, free, multi-lingual knowledge repository. Anyone can update or correct it in real time (which is a bit spooky), so it's really the people's encyclopedia.

Clearly, this also means that facts can be wrong, as you're relying on the voluntary contributions of ordinary people, not necessarily experts in their field. Facts could be wrong accidentally or deliberately - although encyclopedia terrorism is a bit of a sad way to spend your time. However, the contributors are self-policing, with errors corrected and information being added all the time.

There are over a million articles available now, in contrast to the traditional Encyclopedia Britannica's 65,000. Personally, I've never found a mistake, but I've never found one in EB either, though there are apparently quite a few.

One of the most exciting things that's going to happen in the next 10 years, in my view, is that the Wikipedia will move into the physical world. It may not be a Wikipedia initiative (ie it might be a new and different organisation that makes it happen), but the principles will transfer and apply.

Let's look at how this might work.

You're in London and are standing in a pleasant, sunny street in Camden Town. City life is going on around you and you fancy the idea of knowing a little more about where you are right now.

Using your phone, as if it was a PC mouse, you uncover snippets of information from the world around you. You click on an old house in the road and a wealth of digital information comes onto your phone screen. Some contain video and audio links.

You learn that the house is on the site of one lived in by Charles Dickens' wife after their separation. You're interested in Dickens so you poll the area and find that there's actually a tour of Dicken's Camden Town that afternoon.

Out of curiosity, you look up how much this kind of house would be worth, what local rates and taxes are. And you read a review of a local citizen's view of schools in the area.

Moving on you see a tree, which looks unusual and casually click on it to reveal its genus. Then you click on car you like the look of, to find out how much it would cost second hand (2003 model), where you might be able to find one and what the gas consumption is like.

Article Author: Russell Buckley

Visit Russell Buckley's author page — Russell Buckley's Blog