Design/Archive/Wikimedia User Interface/Concepts/Story builder

The following is a concept by User:TheDJ. Enhancing, commenting, creating mockups and forking is encouraged !

Story builder. A curator could build a story using his own words, links to wikipedia, wikisource, commons. include graphs and animations etc, to create a "longform read" about a topic. Think dynamic, multimedia, revisable, updatable New York Times quality long reads. But then with wiki knowledge blocks. It would be a brilliant curated addition, that fits in with the learning and teaching concept. A Wikipedia article can be way too complex or comprehensive to be the best way to communicate certain concepts. By being able to build a story, it might be much easier to pull someone into a path of exploration.

Why story builder ?

Because of stories

Stories are a powerful communication concept. Oral history only had stories to tell. Later, books have often used story telling in both fiction and non-fiction. Encyclopaedias before Wikipedia and especially from over a hundred years ago were also much more about storytelling than about listing facts. We tell bedtime stories to our children. Film and documentaries, snapchat stories, Youtube channels and interactive longform reads have proven over and over again that storytelling just works and is extremely powerful. The story is what matters if you have a story to tell.

Because its different

It's rather different from things that we already have in our ecosphere. The closest we probably have is Wikivoyage and/or Wikibooks. But Story builder would allow the author/curator to choose a different 'form', a different authoring style. Being something different is a GOOD thing. It means that it will appeal to another audience both to write and to consume. It will occupy additional space, instead of conflicting with existing space. But those people will all plugin into the same platform/movement, they will interact with our content, link to it, dive deeper, discover. More people will find more of our projects.

To tie together our content

We have a lot of content in our various projects. We have now tied lots of this content together using Wikidata. We have made the data 'visible' with things like Reasonator. We use lots of Commons images inside our sister projects. But other than that, the integration and cross pollination of our content has never been really great. The encyclopedia wants to not be more than many people want it be. Transliterated books on wikisource, journalism on wikinews and publishing on wikibooks, have never really found much places to connect with our other content.

At the same time, we have been trying very long to get video of the ground. We've been looking at how we can better use graphs, maps, 3d models etc. The problem is that many of these more specific media types require more context and interactivity than there is often a place for in the traditional forms of books, encyclopedias, newspapers and archives that our projects emulate. Our encyclopedia articles fill up with too much detail, their lead sections have too little. Our videos are too factual to be interesting to watch or too opinionated to be able to use them in an article. The majority of images on Commons are not used in other projects, and galleries on Commons have no context. The wikinews, wikibooks and have too little participation due to our chosen form, to be able to create a substantial podium for themselves, and lack a sisterproject that can lend them a podium.

We have talked about where the place is for documenting oral history, or how to deal with knowledge about places where journalism and thus references have not fully developed. We recognise value in those elements, but have not found a place within our projects to do more with those things than effectively putting them in non-visible cold storage, not doing them at all or doing them outside our movement.

How does it work

You can create a story. Your story is made of building blocks, you can write your text, include a gallery of Commons images, add annotations, link or quote wiki articles or wiki references, include a graph of wikidata relations, make a movie and upload it, add a map with an overlay. You can choose what to place where, what to leave out, what to include, you can go high level or dive deep. As you desire.

Tell about the history of your local coal mine or the parallels between the Roman empire and Napoleon. Explain and illustrate the workings of an ion engine or a spinning wheel.

Social

• A story is owned, because it is your story to tell. You need to be responsible for it.
  • Which means your name is put underneath it as well
  • Maybe co-editors can own a story
  • Maybe you can fork it.
  • Maybe other users can make suggestions
• A publishing step likely is required to stay within our mission
  • Might be something like a "Stories for publication"-step
  • or maybe an algorithme does it automatically when enough people have cast a vote
  • or possibly ranking of past stories might influence your ability to publish ?
  • many options here, much to figure out. Definitely different from many other things we have done.

Technology

• shorthand
• long read by WaPo

Remarks

Alternative name idea... 'Witness'