Thread:Talk:New Page Patrol Zoom Interface/Finally!/reply (8)

I couldn't disagree more strongly. The desktop computer is dead in the water and will really only be used for hardware support, under the hood. On the frontend of human computer interaction, we will have gestural input in the air (Leap Motion), virtual retinal display (Google, Microsoft) touch screen tablets embedded into common surfaces (Microsoft Surface) and projection of virtual desktops from your cellphone on any flat surface (LG, Samsung, etc.) This is not science fiction, it is happening right now as I write this screed. As far as users, your comments about what people are doing and how they are doing it is far, far off the mark. Go outside. People are walking down the street and sitting on the bus working on tablet computers. The idea that people a year from now, will still be working primarily from their home, office, and computer room using a desktop computer is WRONG. We are slowly evolving into the pervasive computing paradigm. I can imagine, let's say a year from now, where page patrollers are decoupled from any desktop, with many having trouble understanding what a "desktop" is supposed to be. The page patroller of the future might have a pair of sunglasses on (during the day) which will alert him or her to any new pages or edits made to articles based on his location, giving us a pseudo-amateur-expert approach based on location aware patrolling features. This kind of decentralization of patrolling will distribute the crowd around the world and allow us to monitor topics in real time based on where we are at the moment. Continuing to think in terms of sitting down at a computer in front of a desktop is just ridiculous. Data will be delivered, not scanned, content will be entered with the help of virtual keyboards we can type in the air, not from a piece of plastic, and screens will appear everywhere, even embedded into the sleeves of our clothes. With the maturation of cloud computing services, it won't matter what device you use (and such arguments will seem peculiar in a few years) because the data will be pervasive; you will access it from all devices. Desktop computing is important to the future of Wikipedia in the same way that typewriters are important to the future of book publishing.