I recently read that Wikipedia is planning to pay people to make illustrations for some articles. To justify paying for graphics but not article text, the interviewee claimed that “volunteers apparently don’t find it rewarding” to make illustrations.
But I ask: is this because of some inherent property of illustrating (as she seems to be implying), or is it because no good tools currently exist for collaborative, online image editing? If it were as easy to collaboratively make illustrations as it is to write wiki text, my guess is that lots of people would do it for free. It sure sounds fun to me!
Two of my colleagues at MIT are working on separate research projects which I think could greatly contribute to making such a tool practical. But I can’t disclose those projects here without their permission.
9 years later have any of these projects launched publicly?
Good question. My best guess about the research projects I was referring to in the original post are:
• Sara Su’s work on visual undo histories for vector graphics:
http://uist.acm.org/archive/adjunct/2007/pdf/doctoral_consortium/p29-su.pdf
This work suggests a way to show the history of a wiki-edited illustration in a visual format (vs. textual), at a fine level of detail (individual vector shapes).
• Work from David Karger’s “haystack” group on richer web-based interfaces for querying and editing semi-structured data. One example that comes to mind is David Huynh’s “Exhibit” system:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1242672
Many of us in that research group were trying to push the boundaries of interactivity on the web. Google Maps and Gmail had come out by then and it was clear that rich, visual editing was possible using web technologies. I’ve seen a lot of innovation since then (including major efforts such as web-based office suites from Google, Apple, and Microsoft). However, I continue to be surprised at how slowly the web community overall has moved to embrace richer interaction techniques that have been common in native apps for decades.
I’m not personally aware of any “wikigraphica” projects underway, but I continue to think it’s a great idea, and I’d love to know if any projects do exist!