Social Lab
Welcome to the Social Lab of the Wikia Search project. Please read this page for general guidelines and follow links from here to the Lab's activity areas, sources for additional info, etc.
[edit] Introduction
As mentioned in the main page, the activity of the social lab will focus on two main areas of the open search engine operation which are socially driven by definition - Social reputation and Social ranking/classification:
- Social reputation is a process by which certain content items (mostly URL's) become famous (positive) or notorious (negative).
- Social ranking and classification is a process by which people "manually" change the results of algorithmic ranking and classification.
[edit] General guidelines for the social process
To succeed by attracting enough users and by generating meaningful results, any socially-driven process must be based on the following principles:
- Competency of participants
- A common and clear language of possibilities
- Diversity of choice
- Protection of individual freedom and privacy within the social collective
In addition, it is important to distinguish between four types of individual participants in the process:
- Readers - Readers are the vast majority of participants. They are passive users of the process outputs. Readers, by definition, do not contribute proactively to the social process but may agree to contribute indirectly to the quality of the outputs through reviews and other feedback which is aggregated with the feedback of other readers Popularity-aware ranking.
- Commentators - Commentators provide substantive feedback on the bottom-line quality of the process and its outputs. Unlike the ancillary feedback function that readers may provide, commentators provide contextual and analytical support for their critiques.
- Facilitators - Facilitators typically act as content editors and reviewers, serving primarily as agents for error correction and/or fraud prevention.
- Observers - Observers comprise the smallest group of participants. They provide content and index existing content in special cases where whole new areas of content must be covered and therefore cannot be accomplished automatically through the search algorithm.