The Biz of Coding

Wikipedia for Dummies — Wanted!

by Ujwal Tickoo on January 5th, 2007

If you are a serious Netizen you would have visited Wikipedia for finding comprehensive information on all sorts of subjects — from History and Economics to Famous People, Technologies, and Corporations. However, I have often been frustrated by the density of content on certain subjects.

If Wikipedia intends to be a free universally accessible Encyclopedia on the internet — then it has achieved its goal. However, I often find Wikipedia unreadable on several subjects. The goal of universal accessibility is thus merely technically met. In terms of making subject matter comprehensible — Wikipedia does fall short.

Example: If you are interested to know more about the Long Tail, Wikipedia will tell you that you should know a bit about the Power Law:

The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions (Zipf, Power laws, Pareto distributions and/or general Lévy distributions ). The feature is also known as heavy tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails. Such distributions resemble the accompanying graph.

Hmm…you think let me go over and study what Power Law means. You happily click on this link and soon reach some text that reads:

Because both the power law and the log-normal distribution are asymptotic distributions, they can be easy to confuse without using robust statistical methods such as Bayesian model selection or statistical hypothesis testing. Indeed, a log-log plot of a log-normal distribution can often look nearly straight for specific ranges of x and y.

What! Now you have to be a person deeply educated in statistics to understand the Long Tail from Wikipedia?

 In comes "Wikipedia for Dummies". I can bet that several people who read the For Dummies series are very intelligent and educated people. The charm of For Dummies is that it takes away the fear of appearing stupid and not being "in the know". Its ok to not know everything about everything even if you are an intelligent person — affirms each "For Dummies" author.

For Dummies books talk about important concepts in simple, plain, readable English. Then suddenly there is a midway joke. Time for a relaxing mental break. While you are in a good mood after reading the joke, the author swoops back and repeates the important concept with different wording in yet another simple way. How cool!

If the idea is to make the world's knowledge accessible freely to all — what we need is a Wikipedia for Dummies. Not a new book about Wikipedia. But a New Wikipedia that is written in the For Dummies Style. It could become the next YouTube. You could take this is my 2007 prediction or if you wish to fund this idea feel free to send me a note! Wish you a Great 2007!

I know that this idea is not going to be a part of Larry Sanger's new  Wikipedia rival — Citizendium.

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