User:Alanyst/Curations

I would like to propose public and private curations as a feature with a wide variety of potential uses.

Curation in this sense is a named collection of annotated Wikipedia URLs. This may include basic article links, diffs, versioned article links, category links, and so forth. Essentially, anything that can be transformed to an intra-wiki link could be part of a curation. (Off-wiki links would not be eligible for inclusion, in order to keep the scope of curations focused on encyclopedic purposes.) Links to oversighted or deleted content could be added to a curation but the content itself would of course still be restricted.

Curations are:

Owned and editable by an individual user account; read-only to others if made public
Private to the owner by default, with the option at any time for the owner to make it public or private
Similar to Wikipedia categories, but not hierarchical and the 'namespace' of curation names is per-user
Unrestricted in the number of items they may contain
Cloneable (if made public), so one user may clone another's public curation and manage it as their own from that point on
Queryable: if a user has access to a curation, they may search within the linked pages for certain content, or obtain a random sample (of specified size or percentage) of curated items, or view changes to the linked pages that fall within a given span of time
Contributed under the same license as other Wikipedia content, to the extent the curation is a copyrightable creative work
Versioned like other WP content, so changes can be seen and reverted to older versions

Potential uses for curations:

Decentralized way to share/highlight/feature Wikipedia content ("your own personal FA/DYK")
Personal reference, research, or curriculum
A solution to the request for categorized/tagged watchlists
Management of diffs for dispute resolution or other behavior-focused discussion
Unbiased solicitation of input

User stories:

I select versioned article links for computer science related articles and add it to my "Best of Wikipedia CS" curation. I make the curation public and solicit others' suggestions for additional candidate article versions.
I am planning a trip to Italy and build a curation of articles on cities and attractions I hope to visit.
I am writing a book on Asian history and build a curation of articles that provide useful references to potential sources.
I want to learn more about the solar system and develop a curation of articles on the subject for further personal study.
I pull up my "writing implements" curation and view the most recent changes to the Pencil and Stylus articles but not the latest AN/I dustup, because AN/I is not in that curation.
I have 250 BLP articles listed in a private curation and check it frequently for vandalism or BLP vios on them.
I have a curation of redlinks that I frequently check to see whether those articles have been created.
Preparing evidence for an ArbCom case, I develop a private curation with diffs showing editor behavior; then I make the curation public and link to it (transclude it?) on the case's Evidence page for the committee and parties to review.
I make a "favorite quotes from WP editors" curation and populate it with the pithy sayings, impressive rants, and insightful observations I encounter.
I prepare two curations for an RfA I am about to face: one is "my contribution highlights" and the other is "my contribution lowlights", each containing diffs from my contribution history.
I develop a public curation of userpages of editors who are willing to give thoughtful input on difficult questions, and participants in a certain dispute agree to solicit opinions from a random sample of three of those editors.

Justification: Currently a user can make their own ad hoc curations by creating a subpage in their user space and adding whatever links they wish; but these are public to all and (in theory) editable by others. They are also unwieldy, not being easy to manage, maintain, browse, or query. If curations are added as a supported software feature (similar to how categories and watchlists are) then the management, sharing, access control, transclusion, querying, and recent-changes (watchlist) aspects can be optimized for the user experience.

Other thoughts

The ability to annotate items in a curation has advantages and drawbacks: it can provide useful context for the curated URLs, but can also be abused like any other Wikipedia content (outing, soapboxing, etc.). Admins and oversighters need the ability to (a) force a curation to be private, and (b) restrict a user from making any of their curations public, so that the bits of a curation that would violate WP policy (such as the curation name or the annotations) can be removed from public view and future abuses by that user can be prevented.
Obviously this would involve significant back-end changes to the MediaWiki software; this is a major feature and not just achievable with clever scripts. A careful architecture and design process would be necessary to get it implemented.

I'd appreciate feedback on this idea. alanyst 13:16, 23 October 2013 (UTC)