User talk:WilliamUmpleby

An alternative to Wikibooks
I envisioned an alternative to Wikibooks. It has similar functions, but a much different approach that hopefully makes the learning experience better. It would also be an alternative to search engines.

First, the problem with search engines is that they overwhelm us with search results whose credibility and helpfulness can only be known after we clicked and read through them. This makes online in-depth learning overwhelming as we have no idea what to trust, what to read first, and what to learn next. People will eventually find the digestible content at their level if they have enough time, but this is unbearably inefficient.

In this case, Wikipedia does an excellent job providing quality content, but falls short of providing enough context for readers at every level to fully comprehend its material. This is not what it intends to do, anyway. In my opinion, this is where Wikibooks come in. It provides a comprehensive overview of every topic, from introductory to advance (if there is indeed a vertical structure).

Like everything else, it has a few problems. First, it requires a magnitude higher quantity of content, corresponding to exponentially more work that needs to be done. This could result in a drop in quality and quantity, as there just aren’t enough Wikibookians. Second, wiki perhaps isn’t the best format for producing textbooks, as they have more subjective elements (what to teach first, how to make the content more comprehensible, how large should the scope be), and allowing anyone to edit entails simplicity from the platform’s functions, which causes the content to be monotone (only texts and a few images). I cannot tell how much these two problems are influencing the usage of Wikibooks; but I know that I myself only found out this platform exists by casually exploring my Wikipedia account, rather than researching a topic online.

To backtrack a bit, one solution I thought of to search engine’s messy results is that, because when we probe into new topics online a large chunk of our time would be spent on searching and consuming unqualified content, we can document our path and collectively make them into “roadmaps”, showing the latecomers what credible article to read first, what to watch next, which book to read on a specific topic when you already know the basics, etc. The roadmap community does not produce any content except the maps themselves; for each map, they merely collect the best existing content for a given topic and organize them into a visual, logical structure, like that similar to a mindmap. This way, although the initiated still have to spend time ineffectively exploring undocumented areas today, the about-to-initiate people can avoid this pain tomorrow, following the pioneers’ footsteps.

This is similar to Wikibooks, but it has a few unique advantages: because no original content needs to be produced while organizing is much easier than creating, so 1. More maps/books/guides can be made; 2. Maps can have more depth, as they can include books, long articles and research papers; 3. More mediums can be included, e.g., videos, MOOCs, podcasts, so that maps are more engaging.

Like Wikibooks, it has drawbacks: it also needs to be crowdsourced, while people would be wrongly incentivized to include links to their own websites, so we need to have senior contributors polishing maps and subsequently lock them (at least the set-in-stone parts of the maps); we have less control over the content, as we don’t produce them ourselves, and we might not find the exact content we want; it’s more of a self-learning guide and it cannot be used in classrooms, so in terms of education, Wikibooks prevails as it gives guidance to teachers who can freely structure their courses. I would like to think they complement each other.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, or on how we can restructure information more generally.

I’ve built a sample website (roadmaps.simple.ink, best viewed on a computer) to test the idea, and it will grow into a larger project once iterated a few times. At the moment it's still just structured text with in-text links; it'll be much more visually explanatory once complete. If anyone is interested in joining, you can find my email on the website, and I’ll invite you to the test ground where people can freely experiment with roadmaps on any topic. It's still in its earliest stage, so it's pretty casual and pressure-free, so as long as you're interested in writing and structuring, welcome!