This document discusses potential alternatives to Wikipedia and Google for accessing and sharing knowledge. It proposes "Thunkpedia", a collection of disaggregated knowledge pieces called "thunks" that would be authored by contributors and organized to fit a reader's needs. Thunkpedia aims to address issues like adversarial content on Google and fatigue among Wikipedia contributors by allowing for trained relationships between thunks and calibration to each reader through overview editing and social reinforcement for contributors.

1. Infinithree
Beyond the Wiki Encyclopedia
Gordon Mohr
@gojomo
#BiB11
October 28, 2011

2. Reference Books

13. Alexa ‘Reach’
50% Google.com
15% Wikipedia.org
2% IMDB.com
1% StackOverflow.com,
Answers.com

15. Google
What is it?
• an index
How is it made?
• algorithmic digesting (collection/excerpting/ranking)
• trained by engineers, QA, users
• both precalculated and created-on-demand
And the representative textual artifacts are?
• medium-sized: ranked lists of links/snippets, by query
• tiny: snippet excerpts, by query+URL

16. Wikipedia
What is it?
• an ‘encyclopedia’
How is it made?
• authored summaries in common voice
• tens of thousands of contributors
• precomposed
And the representative textual artifacts are?
• medium-to-long: articles by topic
• tiny/small: abstracts, intro sentences, tables

18. Google: Issues
• Adversarial search: SEO & Content Mills
The Spablum Menace
• Occlusion, Dilution, Duplication

19. Wikipedia: Issues
• ‘Active’ users peaked in 2007
• ‘Encyclopedic’ construed to exclude
Deletionism
• Wearying ‘wikilawyering’
• Far from the ‘green field’ it was

20. So What?

21. The Theory...

22. “There’s Plenty of
Room at the Bottom”
Richard Feynman, 1959

23. Thing Unknown
...or thunk

24. Thunk Collection
What is it?
• disaggregated knowledge
How is it made?
• authored summaries in common voice
• tens of thousands of contributors
• precomposed
And the representative textual artifacts are?
• medium-sized: ranked lists of thunks
• tiny: single thunks

25. ∞ thunkpedia
the sum of all human knowledge... that fits

30. Future
• trained & authored interrelationships
• fine calibration to the reader
• social reinforcements for contributors
• overview editing

31. ∞ thunkpedia
pre-launch discussion at
http://infinithree.org
launching soon at
http://thunkpedia.org
for updates follow
@thunkpedia