| By Russell on Analysis I gave a speech at Wikimania over the weekend, about creating a Real World Wikipedia. I won't put the slides up here as they won't make any sense at all - being mainly pictures to underline what I was saying. But there's a rough, rough transcript of what I talked about minus the errs and ums :-) below. No less than "Jimbo" Wales himself (Wikipedia's founder) came and listened to my thoughts. And when Limor of Cellphedia gave her presentation, after mine, I sat next to the great man. I had prepared some Shot Code printed stickers as examples of the kind of technology that could be used to create physical hyperlinks. Basically you "click" on the Shot Code with your mobile and are taken to the page you've pre-programmed. I had done some to Jimbo's biog on Wikipedia, so was able to present him with these. He seemed quite pleased and impressed, but sadly, he has a very ancient mobile phone, with no camera or apparently a WAP connection, so won't be able to use them. But if any nice PR out there wants to rectify his phone problem, tell him I sent you :D I'm on hols this week, so this is the last post from me for a bit. Carlo will be providing service as usual. "Thank you for coming to hear my thoughts today on one aspect of the future of Wikipedia – bringing Wikipedia into the real world.
Today, I really want to use the session as an opportunity for discussion and visioneering, rather than me preaching at you. So what I’d like to do is give an introduction to the idea and why it might be a natural and useful development for Wikipedia. Also, how the technology might work (though I’m not a techie, so please go easy on me if you are!) and throw this open to you to talk and play with some stuff I’ve bought along with me to demonstrate. Up until now, Wikipedia has been largely accessed by the vast majority of us with our desktop or laptop computers – although I’m sure there’s loads of opinion-leading techies who’ll tell us that they use it via a PDA or over WAP with their cell phones. But these people are in the minority, so far. Typically, we want to know something, we get on over to Wikipedia on our computers and look it up. We get the info mainly in the form of text, but with audio, images and video playing an increasing part in the future. We then may or may not click on some of the links we find to discover more. But wouldn’t it be great if we could do this with physical objects in the world around us? Maybe you’re walking down a street and see an unusual car – you “click” on it (I’ll come back to the clicking technology in a moment) and find out what it is, who makes it, where you can buy one and what a second-hand model costs. This all happens in real time as you stand in the street. Not into cars? What on earth is that weird tree growing over there called? You find that not only is it a Willow, but every single one growing in England is thought to have descended from one grown by the English poet, Alexander Pope. OK – let’s leave the examples for now. I’m sure you get the idea and have plenty of your own. But how would this actually work? Today we’re living in an increasingly cellphone-centric society. There are 1.5 billion mobiles and this is expected to grow to about 2 billion in the next 5 years – actually the latest forecast is that in 2009, I billion will be sold every year. I would argue that the mobile will actually replace the desktop/laptop for most of us as the most important digital device and the main way we access the net and the digital world. What is important though is that mobiles are increasingly able to access the net and we always have them with us. This means that they are the perfect bridge between the digital and physical world. Essentially, therefore, the phone will become the “mouse” that we use to click on and hyperlink to the Real World Wikipedia I’ve described. So how exactly would this work? At its most primitive, we have ideas like the New York based Yellow Arrow project. This is a physical sign placed on a physical object. Someone comes along, puts the sign on something and decides what message the person clicking on it should receive. The sign has a code you sms/text for more information and the information you get is that which the sign creator wants you to get. This is fine as an art project, but a little clumsy as a mass market medium, not to say an expensive way of accessing it. Every time you want to find what behind the Yellow Arrow, it costs you the price of an sms. Next up then, we have a system like a Shot Code. This is much nearer to the vision altogether. You see a sign like this, take a picture of it with your camera phone and get automatically taken to a pre-specified web page. The page which is linked to is decided by the person putting up the Shot Code and can be edited or re-edited by that person too. This is a great method of showing where there is information to be accessed and to popularise the idea. In the longer term, I would see the physical sign as being superfluous in this context (there are many ongoing uses for Shot Code itself), as systems like Siemen’s Digital Graffiti project get deployed. Here, your phone “sniffs out” and alerts you to information already left by previous people. You can pre-specify what kind of information it alerts you to – maybe you’re only interested in cars and commercial offers. Or you can hunt it down yourself manually, if you want to kill a little time or find out something about the world around you. All this means that we have the technology now to bring Wikipedia into our physical environment. But the missing element of all these systems is how will this information get linked and populated? Much of the web-based information is already there – on good old Wikipedia. As an example, the stuff already written on the Lotus Elan is there for all to see. This information will only continue to grow, so in many instances, not much is needed on that side of things, other than the web pages being optimised for mobile viewing. What we would need is the army of volunteers to create the physical links in the first place, using Shot Codes or its successors. Secondly, some information would be very specific to the location and this may indeed need to be created or re-edited. As an example, we know from the Wikipedia a lot about the life and works of Goethe, including the fact that he was born here in Frankfurt. If we were to link the actual house he was born in to the Wikipedia, we might want to included some specific information, perhaps only of interest to someone standing right outside there and then, as well as the wealth of information already created. Finally, like the main Wikipedia, the RWW faces issues with accuracy and encyclopaedia terrorism (even though this little hobby is deeply sad). But it’s only by making this into a mass people’s movement that such challenges can be overcome. This cannot be a commercial project – it’s simply too huge and anyway, what would the commercial benefit be? But it does need the expertise, energy and execution skills that Wikipedia has already demonstrated it has - in spades. I’d now like to throw this open to you, for questions and to hand out a bunch of these Shot Code stickers for everyone to play with!" | 
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